In spite of the rest of the world’s perception, small southern towns knew how to tolerate difference. There was always an old queer or old lesbian couple, or a Boo Radley in town. You just had to not be from away, and stay within in the unspoken boundaries, and you would have grown up knowing what those were. Mary Byrd Thornton is the beleaguered, snarky protagonist in Lisa ... Read More...
The 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...
Mother’s Day: 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...
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...
We Are Water: A Novel
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...
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...
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