While still in her early twenties, Claire Jenks married Charlie Byrne, renowned sexology author and twenty-three years her senior. For ten years she gave up her own writing career to support his fame. One morning as he is walking home from his mistress’s apartment he is killed by a bronze statue that falls from a crane moving it from an apartment. The Widow’s Guide to Sex ... Read More...
Love and Chaos
Part two of my growing up series is book two of Gemma Burgess’s trilogy, Brooklyn Girls. In Love and Chaos, the focus shifts from Pia, the heroine in book one to her best friend, Angie, the rocker girl with the Keith Richards lifestyle. Angie is the type of person who is both scary and someone you want to be. On the surface, nothing gets to her. She could be seen as the ... Read More...
Before My Eyes
It is summertime in a beach town meaning there’s only one place to be if you’re a teenager. Unfortunately, Max is there but it’s behind the counter of the Snack Shack where his father has insisted he works so that he, an affluent politician, can say, “My son works” and make himself sound like the common man. Barkley is Max’s boss, a twenty-on-year old whose lack of any hygiene ... Read More...
Ending October: Mini-Reviews
October was a massive month in book publishing and I was fortunate enough to read some amazing new releases (The Goldfinch, We Are Water, The Signature of All Things). With my focus on works of such depth and intensity some of the novels that did not move me to the same degree got ignored. Here then are three books I read with varying degrees of enjoyment. New ... Read More...
Lookaway, Lookaway
I’ll do my best not to overindulge in Civil War metaphors but I tore through Lookaway Lookaway faster than Sherman went through Atlanta. Wilton Barnhardt has written an addictive novel of the contemporary south. He combines the best and the worst of old and new in a way that is expansive and intimate. The story is about the Johnston family. Matriarch Jerene is the epitome of ... Read More...
The Adventuress by N.D. Coleridge
Vanity Fair is William Thackeray’s cutting look at the foibles and caricatures of Victorian England, as manipulated by the very tenacious and unscrupulous Beck Sharpe. In The Adventuress, author N.D. Coleridge takes this vixen of literature and recasts her in the modern day world as Cath Fox, a young woman from lowly and questionable beginnings who has no intention of ... Read More...
