It seems like a fairly straightforward equation: a father plus a mother plus three children equals happiness, but when the pluses that bind their reality is removed these elements no longer add up and the results are wholly unexpected. In Ramona Ausubel’s new novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty the plus is money, lots and lots of it, enough that Fern and Edgar ... Read More...
Wealthy Women: Mini-Reviews
You might have thought this was a one-time post, but if so, you don't know me well. I love two things in the reading-for-pure-entertainment genre: wealth and dysfunction so I will always give novels that allude to either a chance. If they can also be about female friendship, even better! This month's choices mash things up in a way that makes for interesting ... Read More...
Infinite Home
Edith and her husband Declan bought their Brooklyn brownstone 66 years ago and have been living in it and renting out its apartments ever since. Now Declan has been gone for decades and the brownstone is host to the elderly Edith and four tenants. Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott is the story of this odd collection of souls. There is the artist, Thomas, who suffers a stroke ... Read More...
The Hours Count
Lately, I’ve fallen into a literary rabbit hole of fiction about the 1950s, which is interesting as it’s a time period I’ve never paid much attention to, but is popping up all over the fictional world. The Hours Count is Jillian Cantor’s novel about one of America’s darkest times of political intrigue—when the hunt for Communists meant it seemed difficult to know who ... Read More...
Gold Fame Citrus
Nature refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them. Gold Fame Citrus opens in ... Read More...
Fates and Furies: A Novel
Hello, dear Reader! It’s Monday and I know for a lot of you it’s a busy day, getting back into the weekly grind, so if you’re on the run and don’t have time for a full review, here’s what you need to know: read Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. If you’re a metrics kind of person I’ll make it even easier—I give it 5 stars. Now go. Go and buy it, check it out at the library, ... Read More...
