Nadia’s life is not an easy one. She works not one, but two jobs—as a home attendant for an elderly man and as a nanny for a little girl. It’s necessary because she lives in Brooklyn while her daughter Larissa is still back in Ukraine. They’ve been separated for six years. Lonely years for Nadia as a non-English speaker, looked upon with distrust by the other Ukrainians she ... Read More...
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
Sometimes there are great books that are almost impossible to review. An example is A Little Life—a novel of abuse that, while it was brilliant, was not for everyone. But, what was not difficult about it was the fact of the abuse—a subject that does not divide or cause unease. Bryn Greenwood ‘s debut novel All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is the opposite of A Little Life in ... Read More...
Good Wives: Mini-Reviews
There are Biblical verses, poems, and a plethora of folksy sayings about the value of a good wife or what it takes to be a good wife. There is also no shortage of wives as the mainstay in fiction throughout the ages. I recently read two new novels with wives as the focus: one that looked at the criteria needed to be a good wife in modern day Houstonian society and the other ... Read More...
Bitter Greens
Charlotte-Rose de la Force is a most unfortunate woman for her times. Unmarried and subject to whims of Louis XIV she has provoked his ire once too often with her acerbic writings about the Church and has now been consigned to a nunnery. For a woman who loves her fine silk dresses and elegantly styled hair to be shut away, wearing burlap with shorn hair and no writing ... Read More...
A Paris Apartment
Apparently, this is the week for Paris, as it is once again on my reading list as the subject of a new novel. And, again, it is based in fact. A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable takes the ultra-intriguing facts of a Parisian apartment that lay undisturbed from before WII until 2010 and layers it in with the fiction of American furniture specialist, April Vogt, who is called ... Read More...
The Headmaster’s Wife
Some books are written with the intent to stun a reader with surprise and don’t offer much beyond that. Others, like The Headmaster's Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene, use the surprise (the double surprise, even) as a jumping off point to much deeper issues. It is also a life lesson, one that I failed, because I jumped without thought into the novel’s initial trope of a ... Read More...
