Debut novelist Erika Swyler does not waste any time before throwing the reader into the deep end of The Book of Speculation. The novel begins with Simon Watson, a librarian with the ability to hold his breath for underwater for almost ten minutes at a time, a skill passed on to him by his mother before she drowned herself when he was seven. Now, he lives alone in the family’s ... Read More...
The Water Knife
Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. It can be dicey to open a review with a strong declarative sentence but I’m taking a chance with The Water Knife and stating that I have never read a ... Read More...
Luckiest Girl Alive
Ani FaNelli opens Luckiest Girl Alive by being just that: Perfect hair, perfect body, perfect fiancé and the perfect prima donna attitude to go with it all. Except that underneath, Ani is really TifAni from the far end of Main Line Philadelphia—Main Line being where the upper echelon of Philadelphia society lives and TifAni does not. However, her mother is determined her ... Read More...
Where They Found Her
Kimberly McCreight’s new novel Where They Found Her opens with the discovery of an infant’s body on a college campus. Freelance reporter Molly Sanderson gets the assignment to cover the case for the local paper and McCreight frontloads the drama by sharing that Molly gave birth to a stillborn child a year ago and is only now re-entering the workforce. Thankfully, this ... 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...
Our Endless Numbered Days
There are few things more important to little girls than their fathers and Peggy is no exception. Her German mother is a famous concert pianist but she is often brusque and busy while her father has friends who come over and hang out, smoking and talking about exciting things she doesn’t fully understand. He plays, calls her Rapunzel and has projects that involve her. He is at ... Read More...
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