While still in her early twenties, Claire Jenks married Charlie Byrne, renowned sexology author and twenty-three years her senior. For ten years she gave up her own writing career to support his fame. One morning as he is walking home from his mistress’s apartment he is killed by a bronze statue that falls from a crane moving it from an apartment. The Widow’s Guide to Sex ... Read More...
Love and Chaos
Part two of my growing up series is book two of Gemma Burgess’s trilogy, Brooklyn Girls. In Love and Chaos, the focus shifts from Pia, the heroine in book one to her best friend, Angie, the rocker girl with the Keith Richards lifestyle. Angie is the type of person who is both scary and someone you want to be. On the surface, nothing gets to her. She could be seen as the ... Read More...
Farewell, Dorothy Parker
Have you ever played the history game where you can choose points in history you’d like to visit? For me, the era of the Algonquin Round Table in Manhattan is one such time. Men of great wit and intelligence drinking cocktails and being dominated by one of the greatest wits of all: Dorothy Parker. Given that choice, finding Ellen Meister’s novel, Farewell, Dorothy Parker was ... Read More...
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
After an absence of 14 years Bridget Jones is back in Helen Fielding’s newest novel, Mad About the Boy. The novel is set in present day meaning that while the whole gang is back, they’ve all got steady jobs now and are discussing Botox and fillers to fight off aging. Yes, the flighty and funny Bridget Jones is now entering her fifties and, hold on to your hat, she has ... Read More...
The Hive
There is no shortage of mommy-lit in the world. There are stories (fiction and non-fiction) about nannies, schools, and mothers who work pitted against those who don’t. What is new is Gill Hornby’s debut novel, The Hive, which looks at the uber-competitive world of elementary school from the British mummy’s perspective. St. Ambrose is a school and community that prides ... Read More...
What I Need When I Read
When I read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs I loved it. The protagonist was a middle-age, single woman who was angry about a lot of life. For some this anger was off-putting and there were reviewers who found the woman (Nora) disagreeable and depressing. I certainly felt sympathy for her situation but by and large, even when she made me uncomfortable, Nora was a character I ... Read More...
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