Author Dani Shapiro wastes no time plunging her pen into the marrow of human experience in her latest novel, Signal Fires. It’s a summer night in 1985 and the Wilf family, Ben, Mimi, and their teenaged children Sarah and Theo are about to go from a happy family living to four individuals reeling from unexpected trauma. Before that chapter can be completely digested Shapiro fast ... Read More...
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Cara Romero is one of the many unfortunate workers whose job is lost in the 2008 recession. Now, in order to receive an unemployment check she must undergo 12 sessions with a work coach to help her find other job opportunities. What unfolds in the novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is the transcription of these sessions that ultimately focus less on work and more on ... Read More...
Ordinary Monsters: A Novel
In the world of hardcore readers (yes, that is a thing), there is something called a book hangover. It’s when you read a book so good that your mind can’t detach after you finish, leaving you with a period of time where everything you read is just wrong. Very wrong. I’m in that odd, frustrating space right now thanks to J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters, a fantasy novel set in ... Read More...
The Displacements
In the late 70s, early 80s disaster books and movies were most often centered around manmade situations—The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The China Syndrome, and Airport. It was man’s technical overreach that was going to take us down or at least had us worried. The latest crop of disaster novels is again looking at man’s hubris, but in relation to our abuse of the ... Read More...
The Complicities: A Novel
Con man Bernie Madoff’s life inspired a plethora of novels about the aftermath of a wife left to clean up her husband’s mess. Or at least try to escape it. By and large, they come from a perspective of innocence. But in Stacey d’Erasmo’s new novel, The Complicities, she opts to forgo the black-and-white ease of innocent or guilty to go with something much more compelling—the ... Read More...
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
I adored Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, Hamnet. She returns, with another novel set in the 1500s, but in Italy this time. The Marriage Portrait is about a young Italian princess and bride, Lucrezia of the famous Medici family, known for its support of key artists and scientists of the Renaissance. The Marriage Portrait is both her story and the name of one of the few portraits ... Read More...
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