Once upon a time (oh-so many decades ago), Baby Boomers captured the attention of writers. That time is waning as the next fascination generation crowds at their aging heels. But if Boomers seemed to be a relatively homogenous group, Millennials are not so easily pegged. Recently, I read two novels that staked their ground at opposite ends of the field, with one going ... Read More...
I Was Anastasia: A Novel
I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon achieves quite a feat—taking a subject about which there is no longer any mystery and making it mysterious. Thanks to DNA testing, it is now known that Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia died with the rest of her family in the summer of 1918, slaughtered by the Communists in the basement of a house in the town of Ekaterinburg. But, for ... Read More...
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
I wasn’t planning on making this my week of impressive, but painful, tragic books but here we are. Reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is like watching 12 Years a Slave—both are extremely important, but neither are entertaining or enjoyable. They're too real for that. Cora is a slave who decides to escape from the brutal Georgia plantation that is the only home ... Read More...
Burntown: A Novel
When you are eight-years-old the lines between what is real and what is imagined can still get blurred. So, it might be difficult for Miles to explain to police that he saw a man wearing a chicken mask kill his mother. Except that his statement isn’t even needed—the mask is found in the family’s garage and his father is booked on a murder charge. He commits suicide in ... Read More...
The Word Exchange
A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. - Coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976 ... Read More...
Dark: The Angel’s Game
If you love to read then there is likely to be a time in which you find yourself reading a string of books that follow a similar theme or contain a singular element. A literary synchronicity, if you will. For me, this occurred several months ago and the reviews posted this week are of that time. The unintentional theme was darkness. Each of these three books is well written, ... Read More...
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