Small Admissions is an example of a book whose writing goes the same way as its plot. Confused? I know, it’s weird, but what I mean is that it’s the story of a young woman named Kate whose life goes off the rails when she is unceremoniously dumped by a boyfriend. She basically checks out of life in the most stereotypical ways possible, lingering in an almost catatonic ... Read More...
The Mare: A Novel
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill begins when Velvet, a Dominican girl living in NYC, is eleven and ends when she thirteen, but her life experiences go far beyond her age. Through the Fresh Air Fund, she gets to go to upstate NY for a summer and stays with Ginger (“this blond lady…her face full of niceness with pain around the edges”) and her husband Paul. They live near a ... Read More...
The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
Often the first person narrative is used by an author to create doubt in the mind of the reader. Ratika Kapur does the opposite in her novel, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, with a narrator who calmly tells the truth about her actions from the novel’s beginning to its end. She is a respectable woman—a wife and mother who works at a doctor’s office in Delhi, India. She ... Read More...
The Ornatrix: A Novel
Those of us in the contemporary world often believe that our problems are new to civilization and have never been experienced before, but Kate Howard shatters that belief in her debut novel The Ornatrix. She takes three women and seals their fate to their faces in this gothic tale of beauty set in Italy in the 16th century. Flavia is a country girl whose face is half ... Read More...
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is one of those novels that runs on pure adrenaline. Author Sunil Yapa drops the reader into the chaos of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle with such force that the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and there is no choice but to keep reading. The stream of consciousness style he employs means full immersion in each of the ... Read More...
Victoria: A Novel
In 1837, barely after turning eighteen, Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent became the queen of England. She stood a mere 4’11” tall and had led a life largely isolated from society. For modern day readers it is almost incomprehensible to imagine that a tiny teenager could rule one of the most powerful and widespread empires in the world. Thankfully, author Daisy Goodwin’s ... Read More...
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