It happens in personal relationships and it happens with reading: A book simply does not hold my interest, float my boat, whatever metaphor you want to use. But if the writing is good I’m reader enough to admit: It’s Not You, It’s Me. I’ve always been a fan of South Asian authors so approached these novels with high hopes. In both cases the writing was well done, but the ... Read More...
The Sellout: A Novel
How do you review a book when you’re not quite certain that you should or even that you should have been allowed to read it? This was the question in my mind after finishing Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The novel is set in a ghetto outside Los Angeles called Dickens and is about a young black man whose childhood is spent being homeschooled and basically tortured by his father, a ... Read More...
An Untamed State
When Mireille Jameson returns to Haiti with her husband and infant son to visit her wealthy family she knows of the tensions between the island’s poor and its rich. What she cannot anticipate is that on their way to an afternoon at the beach a gang of men will stop their car, beat her husband and kidnap her at gunpoint. For almost two weeks these young men will hold her ... Read More...
The Portable Veblen
To say that The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie gets nutty is not a derogatory comment because Veblen, the main character, is obsessed with squirrels. As in talk to them, think they’re talking to her, anthropomorphize them. Her fiancé Paul is not as fond of them, but as a research neurologist who has created a medical device that will revolutionize the management ... Read More...
Hunters in the Dark
Lawrence Osborne was a travel journalist and currently lives in Bangkok, but his latest novel Hunters in the Dark is not one that will inspire readers to head to Southeast Asia. Instead, it has a Heart of Darkness feel—where the language spoken by the natives is not one that can ever be learned by foreigners and behind nods and smiles is a deep-seated, unforgiving ... Read More...
The Expatriates
The Expatriates is Janice Y. K. Lee’s new novel about three American women living in Hong Kong: Margaret, a married mother of small children; Hilary, a corporate wife who longs for a baby, and Mercy, a recent college graduate. While each embodies a different phase of life they are on equal footing, living in a city where they don’t belong and where they are unlikely to stay ... Read More...
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