At eight, Hélène Karol lives in a small Russian town with her parents, Boris and Bella, and her grandparents. She is an odd, lonely girl largely because her mother is willful, spoiled and selfish, interested in only her own desires and unwilling to do anything more than blame her daughter for spoiling her fun. When her father loses his job and leaves for Siberia to manage a ... Read More...
In Sunlight and In Shadow
And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold. Mark Helprin’s Winter's Tale was a magical enthralling ode to New York City and the first and only book I wanted to read after 9/11, despite having originally read it when I lived in NYC . It’s a timeless tale ... Read More...
The Forgiven
The suburbs of Tangiers were ruined, but the gardens were still there. And so were the crippled lemon trees and olives, the dogged disillusion and empty factories, the smell of seething young men. A sybaritic weekend in the Saharan desert of Morocco, at a fantastically renovated fortress compound. Richard and Dally have invited friends from around the globe and for Londoners, ... Read More...
Sometimes a Great Notion
When I learned that Ken Kesey grew up in Oregon I thought I was long overdue to read one of his books. I had seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and didn’t think I needed to revisit that subject so I opted for his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The story is set in Oregon logging country in the early 1960s. It catches the Stamper family (aptly named) at the height of ... Read More...
Misfit: A Novel
The 50th anniversary of Marilyn’s death was this month and it’s been heralded by an uptick in new books about her life. I reviewed Lois Banner’s biography Marilyn last week but was interested to see what a fiction author would do, especially as so much of Marilyn’s life reads like fiction anyway. How would one choose which way to go from the trove of material available? In ... Read More...
Suite Française
There are novels that come with a backstory so complex and heartrending the book itself can be overwhelmed. Irène Némirovsky, was a Ukrainian Jew living in Paris with her husband and two young daughters. She was a successful author and had written the first two parts of Suite Française in Paris during the German occupation. In 1942 at age 39 she would be sent to her death ... Read More...
