The pink suit is both the description of the outfit worn by Jacqueline Kennedy when her husband was assassinated and the name of Nicole Mary Kelby’s new novel, The Pink Suit. The novel traces the history of the infamous suit, but Kelby goes beyond that to seamlessly weave a story behind the facts. Kate is a young Irish immigrant whose sewing is of such high quality that she ... Read More...
Amity & Sorrow
Earlier in the year I reviewed a novel (The Visionist) where a mother and her children run for safety to a religious compound. In Peggy Riley’s Amity & Sorrow it is the opposite situation. Amaranth and her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow, are running from their compound because its founder, Amaranth’s husband, has decided it is the end days and has set it on fire so they ... Read More...
Dominion: A Novel
What-if books can go terribly wrong. They require a great deal of thought, generally because they are written about a time when a change in events would bring a massive change to history. In the novel Dominion, C.J. Sansom writes about Great Britain in the 1950s if it had not declared war on Germany but had held to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s desire for appeasement. The novel ... Read More...
Mercy Snow
I’m not a mystery/thriller aficionado so I can’t pretend to know all of the various plot types but from my limited experience there are two ways to go: the-questions-keep-coming, working up to a sonic boom of truth or the reader is in on the mystery and it’s a race to the finish to see if anyone in the cast will figure it out in time. Both ways work, depending on how well ... Read More...
The Abominable
Our valley is in darkness, but Everest blazes far beyond and above us in a cold, powerful, self-contained isolation. That strikes me as terrifying. In 1924 the British alpine climbing community was dealt a serious blow when George Mallory and his partner Sandy Levine disappear high on Mount Everest. At the same time a lesser known but titled Brit disappears and his mother ... Read More...
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt’s latest novel is The Goldfinch. Oh My. This is a B.I.G. book, figuratively (Tartt’s first novel in eleven years) and literally (weighing in at a dense 771 pages on paper that is as weighty and glossy as the words printed on it). Theo Decker and his mother live alone in NYC. The story begins with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum before a school appointment for ... Read More...
