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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

November 10, 2014

we are all completely

Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in the middle of her family’s story, which is a quick indication of how this unusual and highly imaginative novel is going to go. The year is 1996 and she’s in her fifth year of college. A gregarious child she has morphed into a quiet and secretive young woman, largely due to the circumstances regarding the ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, family, literary, mystery, Putnam

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

October 22, 2014

girl half formed

  The heart cannot be wrung and wrung. Eimear McBride brings her main character to life with prose so fractured that A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing reads a bit like Clockwork Orange. There is no made-up language, but McBride uses a combination of Magnetic Poetry and Yahtzee to throw out words in random order with punctuation as an afterthought. Abandon any hope for sentence ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged: Coffee House Press, contemporary fiction, debut, literary

Rooms: A Novel

October 10, 2014

rooms

  People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.  Richard Walker has died and the country house ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, ecco, literary, mystery, paranormal

Station Eleven: A Novel

September 10, 2014

station eleven

I read a fair amount of dystopian fiction this summer- either set in the U.S. or global and I would have saved myself a lot of time if Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel had come out first because it is the best. Big words, I know but, while not garnering the level of publicity of other recent books in the genre, it is a novel that should be noticed for its portrait of an ... Read More...

25 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, dystopia, Knopf, literary, science fiction

Hired Men

August 29, 2014

hired men

Sometimes I end up reading books that are so far out of the genres I usually read it’s refreshing. That’s the case with these two novels about hired men who through their jobs end up in some pretty unusual situations. Both are a quick read and might be good options for the man in your life this Labor Day weekend. Or try them yourself!   Gibson is a rising star in ... Read More...

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, Harper, literary, mini-reviews

The Arsonist

July 25, 2014

arsonist

  In Sue Miller’s The Arsonist Frankie Rowley has returned to the small town of Pomeroy, New Hampshire- a beach town where she spent summers with her family and where her parents, Alylvia and Alfie, have now retired. She has left behind her life in Africa where she spent years working for an organization that helps feed children. She hopes that a quiet summer at the beach will ... Read More...

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, Knopf, literary, New England

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