Sometimes a book’s title is all you need to know about the book. This is clearly the case in Emily Layden’s debut novel, All Girls. Set at the Atwater School, a prestigious girls’ boarding school in New England, the novel has a provocative beginning. As girls and their families drive to the school for the start of fall semester they see hundreds of yard signs along the way ... Read More...
Zorrie by Laird Hunt
Towards the end of last year, the only reading that worked for me was fast paced thrillers. More plot, more action, less literary. This year is taking a turn (or a return) to the fiction that’s always drawn me in, the kind where the words matter more than anything else. Laird Hunt’s latest, Zorrie, epitomizes this style; the power of simplicity. Zorrie is a young girl in ... Read More...
Landslide: A Novel by Susan Conley
When you live in northern coast of Maine you accept your husband will very likely be a fisherman and your life will revolve around water. This is the case for Jill, with her family going so far as to live on a small island. For the most part they’ve made it work, even with Kit being gone for months on end and their having two teenage boys. But now a boat explosion has left him ... Read More...
No Heaven for Good Boys
In Senegal, young boys are often sent from their rural villages to Dakar, a city where they have opportunities for religious and secular education not found at home. Most often it begins when the child is ten, but in the case of seven-year-old Ibrahimah when Marabout Ahmed saves his life, his father, Idrissa, agrees to let the holy man take his son and begin his education ... Read More...
The Charmed Wife: A Novel
When it came out, Olga Grushin’s novel Forty Rooms blew me away. I had never read a piece of fiction that so perfectly encapsulated many of my feelings about marriage and being a woman. It was with great excitement that I saw Grushin was back with a new novel. Actually, excitement and trepidation because the bar would be high and Grushin looked to be mining the same ... Read More...
The Divines: A Novel
Every year there it seems a different theme emerges in fiction. Last year it was twins (The Grammarians, The Vanishing Half, Thin Girls), but this year, although it’s only January, I have three novels in my winter reading that are about girls’ boarding schools. What is it about that subject that entices those of us who were no more likely to attend one than go into outer space? ... Read More...
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