Picture this: you’ve started a mystery/thriller/sci-fi/suspense novel—any book that sucks you into a plot that requires full buy-in on the reader's part. And you do. And it’s well written, it’s all working and then BAM!, it’s not. You’re left like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, a gay man trying to play a straight man discussing the Miami Dolphins. The betrayal, the bewilderment. ... Read More...
Last Night in Montreal
On a cold snowy night a seven-year-old girl leaves her mother’s house when her father beckons her from the yard, beginning an odyssey that continues into her adulthood. Her birth name is Lilia but as she and her father spend the next decade moving from town to town to avoid capture her name changes so frequently it’s hard to remember. Not that it matters, she does not ... Read More...
The Beautiful Bureaucrat
The Beautiful Bureaucrat has been raved about and reviewed by almost every book blogger I know and discussed at The Socratic Salon so I’ll try and keep this brief. No matter what else I think about The Beautiful Bureaucrat, author Helen Phillips has to be commended for writing one of the most immersive novels I’ve ever read. The premise is a bland, grey, dreary world in ... Read More...
The New Neighbor
At 91 Margaret Riley lives a life of isolation on the shore of a small lake in the mountains of Tennessee. Across the lake is another house that has stood empty for years since its owner died but suddenly fills with life again as Jennifer and her 4-year-old son move in. The New Neighbor is Leah Stewart’s novel about Margaret and her sudden fascination with her new ... Read More...
Boo: A Novel
You are thirteen; standing in front of your locker at school one morning and the next thing you know you wake up in an austere white room and are informed you’ve been ‘rebirthed’ into Heaven, although it’s not called Heaven it’s called Town. For most 13-year-olds this would be fairly traumatic but for Oliver, the protagonist in Neil Smith’s Boo it’s not altogether unexpected. ... Read More...
The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty
Plenty of people go on vacation to lose themselves but probably not in the way of the narrator in Vendela Vida’s novel The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. She lands in Morocco and midway through the check-in process at her hotel realizes her backpack has been stolen, almost out of her hands. It contains every piece of ID she has, her wallet, new camera and her laptop. Despite the ... Read More...
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