Margaret Sanger is well-known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and the first advocate of birth control and family planning for women in the U.S. Ellen Feldman’s novel Terrible Virtue begins with Sanger’s impoverished childhood in Corning, New York as one of thirteen children—a fact that greatly shaped her attitude towards child bearing, as she watched her mother die ... Read More...
The Nest
The Nest is contemporary-family-behaving-badly fiction—a genre I generally enjoy. Oh, who am I kidding- I like any family behaving badly in fiction! I mean, why not; it’s so much more fun. Sadly, what makes The Nest contemporary is its all-too-realistic theme: people living out their material dreams through credit. In the case of Leo, Jack, Beatrice, and Melody Plumb the credit ... Read More...
February Library Checkout
Month 2 of 2016 wraps up tomorrow and what a month it’s been. You would think that with this extra day I’d be overflowing with creativity and verve, but instead I’m in some kind of mucky mindset—lots of blah. Thankfully, the same can’t be said for my February library reading! It was a great month for discovering books I might not normally have ... Read More...
The Good Liar
Roy Courtnay has been working one scam or another all his life. Now in his mid-70s he’s turned his hand to internet dating as a way to prey on wealthy widows. When he meets Betty she seems just his type—pretty and a bit ditzy. He provides her with welcome companionship and even opens up with his own concerns about his pension and how to stay financially afloat in ... Read More...
Be Frank With Me
M.M. (Mimi) Banning is a southern college drop-out who writes a novel at age 20 that wins the Pulitzer and sells millions of copies, after which time she withdraws from the world, never to write again. Sound familiar? (Hint: Harper Lee). All right, so it is, but from that single point author Julia Claiborne Johnson spins an exuberant tale of snark and intelligence in Be ... Read More...
Girl Through Glass
In the first chapter of Girl Through Glass, we meet Kate, who tells her story herself. She is in her early forties, a teacher of Dance History at a college in the Midwest. But in chapter two the novel slides back to 1977 and it is about eleven-year-old Mira who is trying to keep her balance between her unstable home life and the ballet school she loves. Burdened with an ... Read More...
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- …
- 24
- Next Page »






