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The Vacationers

June 11, 2014

vacationers

The second novel can be a stressful time for any novelist but more so if their first hit it big, as did Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. How marvelous then when the second novel travels (literally) in a completely different direction but still delivers on-point prose and an engaging story. I’m talking about The Vacationers, Straub’s contemporary look at the Post ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, family, Riverhead Books

Mother’s Day: Glitter and Glue

May 9, 2014

glitter and glue

  Glitter and Glue is a memoir that begins with Kelly Corrigan deciding to take a year off and travel around the world with her friend Tracy in order to break her post-college real world slump. The plans she’d so carefully laid out were not working as she’d hoped, leaving her in a low paying non-profit job and living with her grandmother. The pragmatic advice from her mother ... Read More...

1 Comment
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Non-fiction Tagged: Ballantine, book clubs, family, memoir

Plainsong

December 2, 2013

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...

11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, family, literary, the West, Vintage

We Are Water: A Novel

October 25, 2013

we are water

How a work can be solid and delicate, earthy and of air is a mystery but describes Wally Lamb’s novel, We Are Water. Ostensibly it is the story of Annie Oh—wife, mother, artist and keeper of secrets, secrets that grow and beget other secrets, changing her life and the lives around her. When she is only five, she watches as her mother is swept away by a flood, along with her ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, family, literary, women

Mother Mother

September 20, 2013

mother mother

Koren Zailckas doesn’t waste any time. In her first novel Mother, Mother: A Novel she takes no more than one hundred pages to pull the mask off Josephine Hurst, a woman who believes she is the pinnacle of modern motherhood—raising two lovely daughters (one destined for Broadway) and a son so gifted she has to home school him. Whether this is true or not seems beside the point ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, Crown, debut, family, suspense

The Engagements

August 12, 2013

The Engagements

J. Courtney Sullivan returns, this time turning her insightful eyes to a subject dear to many women’s hearts and one that epitomizes the eternal hope of love, diamonds. In her latest novel, The Engagements, we meet Frances Gerety, the woman who, in the 1950s, created one of the most celebrated slogans of the century: A Diamond is Forever. Frances and her work with DeBeers ... Read More...

2 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, family, historical fiction, jewelry, Vintage

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