J. Ryan Stradal’s new novel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, employs his familiar template of families, food and drink, but once again he uses it to create a fresh canvas for two families in northern Minnesota. Each runs a restaurant, but the similarities stop there. Betty and Floyd run the Lakeside, a traditional supper club with a bar, dance floor, and musical ... Read More...
The Shadow of Perseus
For some, the retelling of Greek myths may have run its course, but for others (me!) I’m still on board to read mythology from a different perspective. My first 5-star novel of the year was Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, a fiercely feminist, wickedly funny adaptation of the Medusa myth. Now, author Claire Heywood is tackling the same subject in her new novel, The Shadow of ... Read More...
Dust Child
The Vietnam War has been written about from many points of view in fiction, but for the most part my reading has focused on the years of the war, rife as they are with the atrocities perpetuated on the Vietnamese, both by their own people (ARVN soldiers in the South, Viet Cong in the North) and then the Americans. Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai takes a longer view by ... Read More...
The Queen of Dirt Island
The week Saoirse Aylward is born her father is killed in an accident, leaving her mother, Eileen alone to raise her. Their lives in a small village in western Ireland are at the heart of Donal Ryan’s boisterous, tender novel The Queen of Dirt Island. Although the novel stays within the village’s borders it’s an expansive story encompassing four generations of Irish women with ... Read More...
This Other Eden
In 1911 there was a small island off the coast of Maine comprised of a group of families who were the descendants of the island’s original 1792 settlers—an escaped slave, his Irish wife, and later, other refugees from society. The island is still there, but its inhabitants are long gone. Paul Harding’s novel, This Other Eden, is the elegiac recounting of their history, lives, ... Read More...
Exit the Actress: A Novel
I’m sticking with historical fiction this week. Monday was mythological history with Stone Blind but now I’ve got a real bit of history set in 17th century England. Exit the Actress is by Priya Parmar and is the story of Ellen Gwynn, a poor commoner in 1600s London who goes on to become one of the world’s first celebrities and King Charles II’s longest lasting affair. Both ... Read More...
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