How has he not had it drummed into him that brats don’t whine? We don’t plead. We don’t need. We require nothing. Not even real roots. We’re air ferns. In Sarah Bird's new novel Above the East China Sea the island of Okinawa is the centerpiece of a multi-generational drama that plays out during World War II and modern times. Tamiko is a native of the ... Read More...
The Jazz Palace
The Jazz Palace begins with a tragedy, the sinking of the SS Eastland while it was still tied to the dock in the Chicago River. The boat was full of workers for a local company headed out for a day of picnicking when the top heavy ship rolled over on it’s side trapping and killing 844 people. In this way author Mary Morris introduces us to Chicago in the early 1900s and ... Read More...
The Sympathizer: A Novel
So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead. It is only fitting that the narrator in The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, is never named. He is a Communist spy, a man who has spent his entire life turned inside ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
This month's It's Not You, It's Me is especially true because I am not really liking, much loving, anything I've read. In fact I DNFed (did not finish) 3 books in a row, which is a first for me. There are any number of bloggers who have blamed this syndrome on the novel A Little Life, which I did read and which is an incredible piece of writing that still haunts me, but I’m not ... Read More...
A Reunion of Ghosts
The Alter sisters, Lady, Vee, and Delph, have decided that, given their family history and their current life situations, it’s time to step off the planet. They’ve picked a date six months away (New Year’s Eve 1999) leaving them time to write a memoir detailing their family tree and the accomplishments of their forebearers. The result is A Reunion of Ghosts, a ... Read More...
Rodin’s Lover: A Novel
I have been intrigued by the life of Camille Claudel since watching the 1988 movie by the same name. She was a sculptor, living in Paris in the late 1800s, a time that was not conducive to female artists of any kind. At seventeen her talent was already such that, because of her father’s belief in her, he hired a real sculptor as a tutor for her. This is where Heather Webb’s ... Read More...
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