What do you do with your life when you’re seventeen and thanks to you your best friend is in a permanent vegetative state? If you’re Shelby you give up college, try to kill yourself, spend time in a psychiatric hospital and when released, shave your head. She is a wraith living in her parent’s basement when Alice Hoffman’s Faithful begins. If this sounds off-putting in ... Read More...
Loner: A Novel
Loner, by Teddy Wayne is a disquieting mix of everything that makes college worth remembering and everything you’d rather forget. David Federman is a high school loner, but he’s not one of the subgroup of computer or science geek elites, he’s just a little odd. What he does have is a way with words, enough so that he’s the only person from his New Jersey school to get ... Read More...
How to Party with an Infant
At twenty-eight Mele Bart finds herself as a single mother, because after giving birth to daughter Ellie her boyfriend Bobby tells her he was "kind of engaged" to someone else. What?! Not one to wallow and with a infant to care for, Mele moves on. In an effort to have some kind of life outside her apartment she tries to find support in one of the neighborhood groups of ... Read More...
Summer Fun Reading: Mini-Reviews
Let's face it, this is not the time of year for War and Peace. Actually, I'm not sure there's ever a time for War and Peace, but that's another post. Right now, if you're lucky, you're sunning and funning so your reading should reflect that. If you're trapped somewhere cold and miserable (like the office) then after work you still need to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne ... Read More...
Opening Belle
Maureen Sherry has a great premise in her new novel Opening Belle—taking the old-boy network theme and applying it to the 2007 financial sector shortly before its meltdown due to the irresponsible use of subprime mortgages to bolster investment banks’ profits. Belle is a smart savvy managing director on the trading desk of a large Wall Street investment firm. Thanks to ... Read More...
A Window Opens
It seems that I stumbled into a payload of modern American life fiction. Two weeks ago I reviewed Days of Awe and now I’m back with A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan, a female centric novel that may seem as if it is weighted with an overload of heavy events but it’s not. What it is is real, messy, complicated, and confusing with new jobs, shifting marital ... Read More...
