Imagine you are a nineteen-year-old soldier and while stationed in Iraq your squad came under insurgent attack in an isolated area. You commit a heroic act of bravery and leave your vehicle to try and save a friend who is being dragged away by the enemy. A Fox news crew captures the entire attack and when it goes viral you are all brought back to the United States to be ... Read More...
The Blazing World: A Novel
The Blazing World came out in paperback last week. This is my original review. Sometimes all it takes is a name and the die is cast. For Harriet Burden, the fact that her father called her Harry from a young age felt like a challenge; one that she grabs onto with all the tenacity of a pit bull, even when it causes her nothing but pain. Harriet is the protagonist in Siri ... Read More...
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in the middle of her family’s story, which is a quick indication of how this unusual and highly imaginative novel is going to go. The year is 1996 and she’s in her fifth year of college. A gregarious child she has morphed into a quiet and secretive young woman, largely due to the circumstances regarding the ... Read More...
Let Me Be Frank With You
Frank Bascombe is back in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You and I, for one am happy to see him again. Ford’s last novel, The Lay of the Land, covered Bascombe’s travails through his mid-fifties in a way that perfectly encapsulated the middle-age process of fight and accept. In Let Me Be Frank With You, Bascombe moves through four vignettes that are comprised of ... Read More...
The Book of Strange New Things
Pastor Peter Leigh is being given the spiritual chance of a lifetime: he’s been chosen to travel billions of miles to a new planet and bring Christianity to its inhabitants. The planet is called Oasis and is managed by a global corporation, USIC. The Book of Strange New Things, the latest novel from Michel Faber, chronicles Peter’s mission and his attempts to stay ... Read More...
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
The heart cannot be wrung and wrung. Eimear McBride brings her main character to life with prose so fractured that A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing reads a bit like Clockwork Orange. There is no made-up language, but McBride uses a combination of Magnetic Poetry and Yahtzee to throw out words in random order with punctuation as an afterthought. Abandon any hope for sentence ... Read More...
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