It’s no secret that Catherine Lowell styles certain elements of The Madwoman Upstairs after Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In fact, the novel’s protagonist, Samantha Whipple, is the last remaining descendant of the Brontë family after her father dies in an unexplained fire at their home. Now she’s at Oxford and her professor, Timothy Orville, is handsome and brooding. ... Read More...
Opening Belle
Maureen Sherry has a great premise in her new novel Opening Belle—taking the old-boy network theme and applying it to the 2007 financial sector shortly before its meltdown due to the irresponsible use of subprime mortgages to bolster investment banks’ profits. Belle is a smart savvy managing director on the trading desk of a large Wall Street investment firm. Thanks to ... Read More...
Rebel Queen: A Novel
As a fan of historical fiction I often find myself reading about women as either accessories or behind-the-scenes figures so it was a welcome delight to read Michelle Moran’s Rebel Queen, about Lakshmi, the Rani (or queen) of one of the states in India in the late 19th century. The novel is told from the perspective of a young woman named Sita who lives with her family ... Read More...
A Window Opens
It seems that I stumbled into a payload of modern American life fiction. Two weeks ago I reviewed Days of Awe and now I’m back with A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan, a female centric novel that may seem as if it is weighted with an overload of heavy events but it’s not. What it is is real, messy, complicated, and confusing with new jobs, shifting marital ... Read More...
The Marriage of Opposites
Beginning in 1795 on the island of St. Thomas The Marriage of Opposites is Alice Hoffman’s newest novel. It is the story of Rachel, a strong willed and intelligent woman, bound by the confines of the times but with dreams of traveling far away to Paris and living a life on her own terms. As the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman she is brought up as young ladies were but ... Read More...
Right Up Until the End: Mini-Reviews
Picture this: you’ve started a mystery/thriller/sci-fi/suspense novel—any book that sucks you into a plot that requires full buy-in on the reader's part. And you do. And it’s well written, it’s all working and then BAM!, it’s not. You’re left like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, a gay man trying to play a straight man discussing the Miami Dolphins. The betrayal, the bewilderment. ... Read More...
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