When Mireille Jameson returns to Haiti with her husband and infant son to visit her wealthy family she knows of the tensions between the island’s poor and its rich. What she cannot anticipate is that on their way to an afternoon at the beach a gang of men will stop their car, beat her husband and kidnap her at gunpoint. For almost two weeks these young men will hold her ... Read More...
All Things Cease to Appear
Last week I reviewed The Undertaking which is a marvelous read in that it allows the reader to fully revel in feelings of rage, disgust and retribution (which is necessary relief if you’re watching political news these days). This is not the case in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear. It is much more attuned to contemporary times, when even though a ... Read More...
Forty Rooms
It is no small feat to write a novel about one woman’s life that taps into the universality of all women’s lives but Olga Grushin accomplishes just that in her new novel, Forty Rooms. With a construct based on the belief that— Forty is God’s way of testing the human spirit. It’s the limits of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true each ... Read More...
The Portable Veblen
To say that The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie gets nutty is not a derogatory comment because Veblen, the main character, is obsessed with squirrels. As in talk to them, think they’re talking to her, anthropomorphize them. Her fiancé Paul is not as fond of them, but as a research neurologist who has created a medical device that will revolutionize the management ... Read More...
Be Frank With Me
M.M. (Mimi) Banning is a southern college drop-out who writes a novel at age 20 that wins the Pulitzer and sells millions of copies, after which time she withdraws from the world, never to write again. Sound familiar? (Hint: Harper Lee). All right, so it is, but from that single point author Julia Claiborne Johnson spins an exuberant tale of snark and intelligence in Be ... Read More...
Hunters in the Dark
Lawrence Osborne was a travel journalist and currently lives in Bangkok, but his latest novel Hunters in the Dark is not one that will inspire readers to head to Southeast Asia. Instead, it has a Heart of Darkness feel—where the language spoken by the natives is not one that can ever be learned by foreigners and behind nods and smiles is a deep-seated, unforgiving ... Read More...
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