The Cloisters by Katy Hays has a catnip premise for readers like me: A studious young woman graduates from college and moves to the big city to get away from her sad, small-town life. In this case the girl is Ann and the city is Manhattan where she’s got a summer internship at The Cloisters, a medieval museum. For Ann what begins as a simple job that will lead to the graduate ... Read More...
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is back with Demon Copperhead, a serpentine tour-de-force set in the southern Appalachian Mountains. A modern-day David Copperfield, the novel follows Damon Fields from his ignominious birth in a trailer to a single, teenage mother doped out of her mind, all the way through his teens. It’s not a journey for the faint of heart, but the world Kingsolver builds ... Read More...
Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
Carlotta has had a time of it. She was sent to prison for 23 years because she was holding a gun nearby when someone was murdered. Worse, when she got there, she was a young man who knew he was meant to be a woman. Something the state had no interest in hearing and something that brought her a world of misery because they would not transfer her to a women’s prison. Now, she’s ... Read More...
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
What better time to review a novel set in an unspecified time in America’s not-too-distant future than the day before an election? Celeste Ng’s novel, Our Missing Hearts, could either be the way things should be or a dystopian hell, depending on your beliefs. I’ll leave it to you to suss out where I stand, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Bird is 12-years-old and lives with ... Read More...
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Cara Romero is one of the many unfortunate workers whose job is lost in the 2008 recession. Now, in order to receive an unemployment check she must undergo 12 sessions with a work coach to help her find other job opportunities. What unfolds in the novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is the transcription of these sessions that ultimately focus less on work and more on ... Read More...
The Complicities: A Novel
Con man Bernie Madoff’s life inspired a plethora of novels about the aftermath of a wife left to clean up her husband’s mess. Or at least try to escape it. By and large, they come from a perspective of innocence. But in Stacey d’Erasmo’s new novel, The Complicities, she opts to forgo the black-and-white ease of innocent or guilty to go with something much more compelling—the ... Read More...
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- …
- 62
- Next Page »
