There are times when what is needed is a story so utterly foreign that it plucks us out of our own world and drops us into one for which our background leaves us completely unprepared. I found this with Lisa O’Donnell’s debut novel The Death of Bees: A Novel. Set in Glasgow, it encompasses the world of Marnie and Nelly, two teens left on their own when their parents die. Well, ... Read More...
The Lion Seeker
The son of Lithuanian Jews who left the country in the 1920s and moved to South Africa, Isaac Helger grows up believing the only way to have self-worth is through money. “Working” for a living, as his watch repairman father does, is embarrassing. As the protagonist in Kenneth Bonert’s novel, The Lion Seeker, Isaac embraces his mother’s credo of “Are you a stupid or a ... Read More...
Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
And that’s how it happens. Like a broken record, warped and scratched. Once I was music, now I am just noise. It requires a special gift to bring forth a largely unlikable character who can also evoke sympathy but Juliann Garey has done just that in her debut novel Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See. Greyson Todd is from one of the most unlikable genres of men in fiction ... Read More...
Plainsong
From an aerial satellite view one might think Holt, Colorado to be a town so tiny as to be without interest. That would be the case if not for Kent Haruf, who brings this town to quiet, poignant life in the novel Plainsong. There are the McPheron brothers, older farmers who have never married and still live life much as they always have. There is Guthrie, a teacher with two ... Read More...
Want Not
In his new novel, Want Not, author Jonathan Miles explores the concept of wanting in contemporary American society. The story moves between the disparate lives of three groups: Elwin Cross, an overweight linguist professor whose wife has recently left him for a chef; Talmadge and Micah, a young freegan couple squatting in a tenement in Manhattan; and Sue, a 9/11 widow, her ... Read More...
Doctor Sleep: A Novel
If you are one of the five people on the planet who has never read Stephen King let me bring you up to speed. He is the prolific writer of some of the all-time scariest books in history. The only way I was able to read The Shiningwas when I worked in a manufacturing plant, on work breaks, midday in a brightly lit room, sitting on a chair with my back to the wall and an open ... Read More...
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