Past, present, and future too swirl together, distinguishable but not delineated by any sort of grammar beyond the one our hearts impose. The narrator in Green Island is born on the night in 1947 when the tension between the factions in Taiwan explode into civil violence. Her father, a doctor, in attending a community meeting the next night and quietly asking ... Read More...
The Choices They Made: Mini-Reviews
When enjoying a book a lot comes down to understanding the characters. I don't even need to like them (in fact sometimes it makes for better reading if I don't) but I have to believe in their actions. Maybe even more so when they're women--because really, who has any idea why men do what they do?! Sadly, two of January's new releases were about women where I didn't believe the ... Read More...
Black Chalk
There are many games to be played in college but none quite like the one designed by Jolyon and his friend Chad in Christopher Yates’s debut novel Black Chalk. The novel, just like the Game itself, begins with innocuous pieces to lure you in—Chad, the shy American determined to make the friends in England that he could not make at home; Jolyon, the funny British boy who ... Read More...
The Improbability of Love
When Annie buys a painting at a junk shop in London she has no idea what she’s getting herself into. It’s supposed to be a gift for a new boyfriend but when he’s a no-show she keeps it. The now ex-boyfriend is only one more disappointment in a life that seems to be stalled, in Hannah Rothschild’s new novel, The Improbability of Love. At 31 Annie has a temporary job ... Read More...
Slade House
At least once in every reader’s life a book comes along where they think ‘I wish the author had written more about that.’ For fans of David Mitchell that wish often comes true, thanks to his ability to resurrect characters in different iterations and insert them in subtle ways from one novel to the next. In his last novel, The Bone Clocks, there was a supernatural ... Read More...
City on Fire
If you follow the publishing world then you know that Garth Hallberg was paid 2 million dollars for his debut novel, City on Fire, a story of NYC, wrapped around a wealthy family, an attempted murder, and the blackout of 1977. The Hamilton-Sweeneys are the family, and are as dysfunctional as one would expect in a work of literary fiction. There are secrets, bad ... Read More...
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