You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. A man and his young son are walking on a desolate road surrounded by burnt trees and ashes. In the distance fires still burn. They are headed…where? To safety would seem to be the answer, but in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road there is no safe place. The world as we know it has gone up in flames. ... Read More...
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge is a woman in her 60s, living in a small town in Maine, who has something to say about everyone and most of it is not good. She is also the character at the center of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. Strout is coming out with a sequel, Olive, Again, this fall so I thought I should get to know Olive in the first book. This was ... Read More...
5 Star Week: All the Light We Cannot See
I may be writing this review to watch myself write because virtually every reader I know has already read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. Ostensibly, my excuse is, this Pulitzer Prize winning novel originally published in 2014 is being re-released in paperback. But really? WHY did it take me this long to read this wonder of a novel? I have no decent reason. ... Read More...
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt’s latest novel is The Goldfinch. Oh My. This is a B.I.G. book, figuratively (Tartt’s first novel in eleven years) and literally (weighing in at a dense 771 pages on paper that is as weighty and glossy as the words printed on it). Theo Decker and his mother live alone in NYC. The story begins with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum before a school appointment for ... Read More...
Darker: The Orphan Master’s Son
By its very nature dystopian fiction is dark but Pulitzer Prize winning The Orphan Master’s Son is not technically dystopian. It is set in North Korea, which exists (as we are all too aware recently) and yet the events and lives of the characters are fantastical in their danger, impoverishment, and deprivation. The protagonist is Jun Do, a boy whose mother died when he was ... Read More...
