On Monday I mentioned having a book hangover and Delia Owens’s debut, Where the Crawdads Sing, is the culprit. What is worse is that I tried to read my way out of it and got mired in overwrought, pretentious prose that pushed all of Crawdads beauty out of my head and filled it with a tarry gunk that immobilized my brain. A foolish mistake that I’m paying for now. Still, I’ll ... Read More...
There There by Tommy Orange
One of the downsides of reading a lot is the feeling that, while you still enjoy most of what you read, some of it tends to sound familiar—as if you’ve read it before. Which is not unreasonable, as ‘how many truly distinct plots there are in fiction’ is a subject of debate even among critics. Still, it makes it that much more exciting when I come upon something wholly ... Read More...
A Place for Us: A Novel
A Place for Us opens just before the beginning of an Indian family wedding in California. The bride, Hadia, is hoping that her brother, Amar, will show up. No one in the family has seen him for three years, but Hadia hopes their bond is strong enough to bring him back, despite the problems with their father that made him run away. Amar does attend—marking the wedding as both an ... Read More...
The Book of Essie: A Novel
For most young girls, being seventeen and pregnant is not a good place to be. For Esther Hicks it’s even worse because she is the youngest daughter of a fundamentalist pastor and part of a reality TV show about their family. With a life played out in front of the camera and the nation, how can this be anything but catastrophic for Essie, and more importantly, for the show's ... Read More...
Fat Girl on a Plane
When you’re fat, you’re very conscious of the area you occupy. Of all the people in the universe, the overweight are the most conscious of personal space. We never want you to have to rub up against us. Fat Girl on a Plane is both the title of Kelly DeVos’s debut novel and the defining moment in its heroine’s life. Cookie Vonn is a 17-year-old blogger on her way to NYC to ... Read More...
The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy
Summertime is thriller time. There’s something about the pacing, when it’s done right, that matches the weather to my brain—overheated and a bit frenetic. The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy is my most recent venture into twisted turn thriller territory. Molloy doesn’t go for subtle in choosing a plot guaranteed to ratchet up the tension: an infant disappears from his mother’s ... Read More...
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