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The House of Hidden Mothers

June 29, 2016

monday reading

  The House of Hidden Mothers is a melting pot of a lot of timely themes, but author Meera Syal manages them without overwhelming the flavor of the story. Forty-eight-year-old Shyama owns a successful beauty salon in London where she lives with her thirty-four-year-old boyfriend Toby and her daughter Tara, who’s attending university. By and large she is happy with her ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary fiction, family, Farrar Straus Giroux, India, London

The Girls

June 27, 2016

girls

I wanted them to like me.  Such a simple sentence. Six words, and yet, coming three-fourths of the way through Emma Cline’s debut novel The Girls, they hold the key to the entire novel. They are instantly recognizable to any woman with a memory of her teenage years and they define fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd, the novel’s narrator. But as simple as they are they are also ... Read More...

10 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: 1960s, book clubs, coming-of-age, Random House

The World Without Us

June 22, 2016

  Tess Müller hasn’t spoken in six months. Her mother, Evangeline, pushes a pram around all the time. Her younger sister draws trees and more trees. In most places they would stand out, but in the Australian town of Bidgalong strange is a relative concept. For decades the hills near the town were home to a cultish commune known as The Hive with its alpha male leader ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Australia, Bloomsbury, family, literary

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

June 20, 2016

sons and daughters

  It seems like a fairly straightforward equation: a father plus a mother plus three children equals happiness, but when the pluses that bind their reality is removed these elements no longer add up and the results are wholly unexpected. In Ramona Ausubel’s new novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty the plus is money, lots and lots of it, enough that Fern and Edgar ... Read More...

10 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: 1960s, 1970s, book clubs, family, literary, Riverhead Books

The Summer Guest

June 15, 2016

summer guest

  Zinaida, Katya, and Ana have nothing in common, especially given that Zinaida lived in the small town of Sumy in the Ukraine in the 1800s and Katya and Ana are modern women. But in Alison Anderson’s debut novel, The Summer Guest, their lives intersect as Katya discovers Zinaida’s diary and hires Ana to translate it into English. For all three women this is their chance ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, Harper, historical fiction, Russia

Dear Fang, With Love

June 8, 2016

dear fang

Because she wasn’t a trendsetter. No one could hope to be like her. She was one of a kind and, because of this, very much alone. About whether she was pleased with this state of affairs or saddened, I was never entirely sure. Maybe she would have liked to belong. ‘She’ is Vera, Lucas’s teenage daughter. For most of her life he’s been absent; she was the result of a wild whim ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: coming-of-age, contemporary fiction, family, Knopf, literary, mental health

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