Sweet sixteen—a time of so many changes. Learning to drive, first dates, preparing for college, and, if you’re Emily Shepard, a nuclear reactor meltdown near your tiny town in Vermont, your parents disappearing, and being evacuated from your school with only the clothes on your back. This is sixteen as seen by Chris Bohjalian in his new novel, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands. When ... Read More...
Young God: A Novel
Within the first eight pages of Young God, thirteen-year-old Nikki jumps off a cliff into a pool of water below after being dared, flirts with her mother’s boyfriend, and then watches her mother die as she attempts the same jump from the cliff. By the end of the second chapter, she has had sex with the boyfriend, stolen his car and his bag of drugs, and moved back into her ... Read More...
The Vacationers
The second novel can be a stressful time for any novelist but more so if their first hit it big, as did Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. How marvelous then when the second novel travels (literally) in a completely different direction but still delivers on-point prose and an engaging story. I’m talking about The Vacationers, Straub’s contemporary look at the Post ... Read More...
The Snow Queen
People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two. Michael Cunningham’s new novel, The Snow Queen: A Novel, has an opalescent blue-green cover that shimmers with the same light Barrett Meeks sees above his head one stormy winter night in Central Park. Is it real or a product of his imagination? That ... Read More...
Wonderland
In fact, I was in wonderland then, but only in some hazy amber of memory. At the time, I wasn’t anywhere. I was reaching for the train as it disappeared, flash of silver, around a curve. Now I’m trying to go back to a place I’ve never been. Anna is a rock star. Not the classic variety but the indie variety. On her way to the top, with a record deal in hand and three albums ... Read More...
Astonish Me
Joan Joyce is a dancer who has wanted to be a ballerina her entire life. Unfortunately her desire outweighs her talent and so she is relegated to the corps. The center stage she longs for does not become hers until she is the woman who helps a young Russian dancer escape from the Soviet Union to the United States. She had seen Arslan Rusakov dance in Paris and had kept in touch ... Read More...
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