What if you had broken the law and rather than being sent to prison you could opt into a program that would make you a better person? The upside is it’s not prison, you get to keep your job, you have no living expenses, and when you’re finished after six months you’ll be provided with a down payment on a new home and will be on your way to personal and profession success. The ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
Telling you that Christopher J. Yates’s new novel, Grist Mill Road, is about a boy who ties up a girl and shoots her forty-nine times with a BB gun while his friend watches is not a spoiler, because Yates makes it the first page of the novel. It’s simply his way of making sure he’s got your attention. It is also not the crux of the novel. For that he has a ... Read More...
This Is How It Always Is
Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways ... Read More...
My Absolute Darling
What do you need to know about Turtle Alveston beyond her weird name? Well, she knows her way around almost every firearm there is and she eats raw eggs for breakfast. She is fourteen, but while she goes to school she doesn’t talk and is about to be held back from high school. She lives with her father in the woods of Mendocino. These simple facts might sound like ... Read More...
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
I’m a fan of detail in my fiction. I love it whether it’s literary (Donna Tartt) or historical (Alison Weir, Ken Follett), but when it isn’t specific to the story and is in fact an extrapolation of some minor concept, it can be exhausting. This means I left Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House feeling that the book was 800 pages long when it was actually only 380. Why? ... Read More...
Sing, Unburied, Sing
JoJo lives in Bois, a small town in rural Mississippi, with his Pop and Mam—his mother’s parents, and his little sister, Kayla. His mother, Leonie, is a sometime visitor, but drugs and other past-times mean she’s not around much. His father, Michael? He’s in Parchman prison. And he’s white, which means JoJo has a whole other family that wants nothing to do with him or ... Read More...
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