When a novel opens during a heat wave with a ten-year-old boy breaking a window to get out of an apartment with no electricity after being left alone for a week while his mother goes out to buy drugs it doesn’t seem as if much nuance to the story can follow. Unless the author is Thrity Umrigar, one of my favorite writers for presenting human emotion at its messy, inconvenient, ... Read More...
Salt Houses: A Novel
There are plenty of times when fiction ventures into territory that is unfamiliar—in fact, that’s one of the reasons I love it so much. But Salt Houses, the debut novel from Hala Alyan is about a subject that I almost can’t wrap my mind around. The fact of having been driven out, by force or war, from not just your home, but virtually every country where you’ve settled. For ... Read More...
The Witchfinder’s Sister
The Witchfinder’s Sister is Beth Underdown’s dark novel of dark times. It’s 1600s England and Alice is pregnant, her husband is dead and she must return to live with her brother whom she hasn’t seen in five years. Her brother who wanted to become a minister, but due to their father’s death had to earn a living as a scribe. Now grown, he has become the man charged with ... Read More...
The Widow of Wall Street
The Bernie Madoff story is so perfectly set up that there is little point in messing around with its formula, even for fiction. Thankfully, Randy Sue Meyers doesn’t change much of the story in her new novel The Widow of Wall Street. Jake is a trader who starts his own company with a straightforward brokerage side and the more mysterious Club, where he picks stocks for a select ... Read More...
5 Star Week: Before the Wind
There's no better way to wrap up a week of fabulous 5 star reading than with one of my favorite books of 2016. Jim Lynch is a Seattle author and this lovely book about a quirky family of sailors works even if you hate water. It just came out in paperback so I'm talking it up all over again. At the most basic level Jim Lynch’s new novel Before the Wind is the ... Read More...
The Fall of Lisa Bellow
Lisa Bellow is blonde, pretty and popular—everything every young girl wants to be in middle school. Unfortunately, she is also well on her way to being a complete bitch. Her popularity is a weapon she wields against all the other less self-assured girls in the 8h grade, including Meredith Oliver. So, when Lisa is abducted it breaks open a jar of conflicting emotions in ... Read More...
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