First of all, if you tell me a book is about a young woman who gets a master’s degree in library science, loses her job and ends up spending her days hanging around the local used book store, I’ll have my credit card out before your words disappear. Librarian? In. Unemployed? In. Book store? All the way in. So, there was no doubt I was going to read Shelly King’s The Moment of ... Read More...
How To Be a Good Wife
When Marta and Hector married, his mother gave her a book of domestic lessons entitled How to be a Good Wife. By the time they’ve been married for over thirty years Marta knows it by heart and knows that bread must be baked fresh every day, that only the husband belongs in the outside world, and that ”catering to his comfort will give you an immense sense of personal ... Read More...
The Blazing World: A Novel
The Blazing World came out in paperback last week. This is my original review. Sometimes all it takes is a name and the die is cast. For Harriet Burden, the fact that her father called her Harry from a young age felt like a challenge; one that she grabs onto with all the tenacity of a pit bull, even when it causes her nothing but pain. Harriet is the protagonist in Siri ... Read More...
What the Lady Wants
For almost as long as I have loved books I have loved fashion and before my career in the book world I was a buyer for a large department store in Atlanta called Rich’s. Remember the good old days when department stores had a name other than Macy’s?! One of the best known in the Midwest was Marshall Field’s and in her new novel, What the Lady Wants, Renée Rosen captures its ... Read More...
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in the middle of her family’s story, which is a quick indication of how this unusual and highly imaginative novel is going to go. The year is 1996 and she’s in her fifth year of college. A gregarious child she has morphed into a quiet and secretive young woman, largely due to the circumstances regarding the ... Read More...
Let Me Be Frank With You
Frank Bascombe is back in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You and I, for one am happy to see him again. Ford’s last novel, The Lay of the Land, covered Bascombe’s travails through his mid-fifties in a way that perfectly encapsulated the middle-age process of fight and accept. In Let Me Be Frank With You, Bascombe moves through four vignettes that are comprised of ... Read More...
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