Despite its upbeat sounding title Lucky Boy is a novel saturated in desperation. Desperation for a better life, desperation for a child, for success…for happiness. Solimar is eighteen, lives in a dying town in Mexico and with money her parents procure she leaves with a man who is supposed to get her to California where she will meet up with a cousin who has already ... Read More...
The Second Mrs Hockaday
Placidia is seventeen when she meets Major Hockaday and when he proposes that very same day she says yes. That he is a widower and has a small son makes little difference to her. It’s 1865 and given the war there’s no point in waiting for a proper courtship and wedding. In fact, the very next day they set off for the Hockaday’s home. From there, Susan Rivers’s novel The ... Read More...
The Mare: A Novel
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill begins when Velvet, a Dominican girl living in NYC, is eleven and ends when she thirteen, but her life experiences go far beyond her age. Through the Fresh Air Fund, she gets to go to upstate NY for a summer and stays with Ginger (“this blond lady…her face full of niceness with pain around the edges”) and her husband Paul. They live near a ... Read More...
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is one of those novels that runs on pure adrenaline. Author Sunil Yapa drops the reader into the chaos of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle with such force that the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and there is no choice but to keep reading. The stream of consciousness style he employs means full immersion in each of the ... Read More...
Delicious Foods: A Novel
Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas…Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don’t call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible. If I were handing out book awards, ... Read More...
Cruel Beautiful World
Sometimes a book’s marketing can end up working against it. I found this to be the case with Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World. The synopsis and various blurbs referenced the Manson murders—a real piece of clickbait and yet, aside from being set in the summer of 1969 and the main protagonist’s worry about being left home alone the novel had nothing to do with ... Read More...
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