What do you do with your life when you’re seventeen and thanks to you your best friend is in a permanent vegetative state? If you’re Shelby you give up college, try to kill yourself, spend time in a psychiatric hospital and when released, shave your head. She is a wraith living in her parent’s basement when Alice Hoffman’s Faithful begins. If this sounds off-putting in ... Read More...
Cruel Beautiful World
Sometimes a book’s marketing can end up working against it. I found this to be the case with Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World. The synopsis and various blurbs referenced the Manson murders—a real piece of clickbait and yet, aside from being set in the summer of 1969 and the main protagonist’s worry about being left home alone the novel had nothing to do with ... Read More...
The Golden Age: A Novel
Joan London’s The Golden Age is a quiet novel about a frightening time in the 1950s when, instead of fun and freedom, summer came to mean fear and isolation as pools were closed and children kept inside the house in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded polio. The Golden Age is a convalescent home in Australia where children who have been stricken with the disease are sent ... Read More...
Loner: A Novel
Loner, by Teddy Wayne is a disquieting mix of everything that makes college worth remembering and everything you’d rather forget. David Federman is a high school loner, but he’s not one of the subgroup of computer or science geek elites, he’s just a little odd. What he does have is a way with words, enough so that he’s the only person from his New Jersey school to get ... Read More...
Commonwealth: A Novel
The Keatings and the Cousins turn into one extended broken family when Mr. Cousins decides to kiss Mrs. Keating at her daughter Franny’s christening. Two divorces and relocation follow and what were two distinct sets of children merge into one unruly tribe in Virginia every summer. This is Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Commonwealth, and it is a story as comforting in its ... Read More...
Invincible Summer
Less than a quarter of the way into Invincible Summer and I realize why the novel feels so comfortable—I’ve superimposed the characters from Four Weddings and Funeral over the ones Alice Adams creates. This is not a bad thing because the story is not derivative, but you do have a small, tightly knit, British group of friends who get together once a year, not for ... Read More...
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