Take the unreliable narrator format from Gone Girl and multiply it times three and you’ve got Paula Hawkins’ debut novel The Girl on the Train. Three women—Anna, Rachel, and Megan—all pass through the same time and space but each from a very different perspective, varying from sad to what appears to be flat out crazy. For Rachel, being unable to conceive leads to solace found ... Read More...
Gretel and the Dark
Unless you’re reading a book of short stories it is unusual to get more than one scary plot in a single novel, but that is exactly what happens in Eliza Granville’s debut novel Gretel and the Dark. There is Lilie, the beautiful young patient of Dr. Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud’s mentor. She is found beaten, abused and with her head shaved. She only speaks when ordered and ... Read More...
The Paying Guests
By the end of World War I Frances Wray has lost almost everyone in her life she cares about—her two brothers to the war, her father to a heart attack, and the person she loves to the circumstances brought about by so much death and change. She and her mother are left with a grand old house but no money, as her father lost it all in bad investments before his death. It is ... Read More...
Friendswood: A Novel
Friendswood, Texas is a good, old oil-based community. Rosemont is a small suburb built near a refinery and life is good there, until funny greasy black coils of goo start appearing in people’s yards like fat worms after a rain. Friendswood by René Steinke begins years after the fallout from the leakage of deadly chemicals in the field around which the houses of Rosemont were ... Read More...
Mambo in Chinatown
Jean Kwok is back with Mambo in Chinatown, another tenderly crafted novel about the assimilation process for Chinese immigrants in America. This time we’re absorbed into the life of Charlie Wong, a twenty-two year old woman, who, as the novel begins, is working as a dishwasher in a restaurant where her father is the master noodle-maker. When she has the opportunity to take ... Read More...
The Vacationers
The second novel can be a stressful time for any novelist but more so if their first hit it big, as did Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. How marvelous then when the second novel travels (literally) in a completely different direction but still delivers on-point prose and an engaging story. I’m talking about The Vacationers, Straub’s contemporary look at the Post ... Read More...
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