Everyone knows the writer’s life is not an easy one. For 31-year-old Casey it feels almost impossible. Her mother died suddenly, her boyfriend is gone, she’s working two jobs, and she lives in a space that used to be a potting shed. She wants to write a novel, but after six years has made little progress. Her friends from college and grad school, many of whom wanted to be ... Read More...
The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora
The Paper Wasp is the story of two young women living in small Michigan town who were best friends. Up until high school that is, when Elise was discovered and left town for L.A. to become an actress. In losing her popular best friend, Abby floundered and even though she ended up as valedictorian she never fit in again. Now, a decade has passed and Elise’s star is on the rise ... Read More...
Virgil Wander: A Novel by Leif Enger
Greenstone, Minnesota is a hard luck little town. Once known for its taconite mines it has settled into a slow decline when Virgil Wander’s car goes over a cliff and into the lake one night in the midst of an unexpected snowstorm. He’s only alive because the local junkman was on the shore, dove in and saved him, but he suffers brain trauma that leaves him with vertigo, an ... Read More...
It’s Not You, It’s Me: Mini-Reviews
Back for the first time in 2017, it's the It's Not You, It's Me review extravaganza. All right, maybe not an extravaganza, but I do have two books I read recently that did not ring my bell but might be just right for other readers. Parallel stories of family, art, and loss are at the center of Ellen Umansky’s new novel, The Fortunate Ones. In the present, ... 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 Undertaking: A Novel
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of novels set in Berlin in the midst of World War II. Novels that document the trampling of many people’s lives into oblivion. Author Audrey Magee does not go the route of the victim or the innocent bystander. Instead, in her novel The Undertaking we meet Peter Faber, a German soldier stationed on the Russian front who decides to take ... Read More...
