The Grasshopper and the Ant
I expect many readers have heard of and/or read Ann Patchett, but how many have heard of Lucy Grealy? I had not. Grealy wrote a well-received memoir, Autobiography of a Face, but only one, and she died young, which is...
High Finance and High Stakes
Maybe it is typical of a Ken Follett novel that characters tend to be villains or heroes, to be two dimensional and typecast, because he mostly uses his characters as props to move his plotline swiftly along. In this novel...
A Domestic Bubble
Here’s my hypothesis: ‘normal’ life right now is so stressful, traumatic and chaotic that authors are tilting towards gentler plots that avoid dealing with current events. There was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake: a sweetly written story with no narrative tension...
A Sight for Sore Eyes
This is maybe a novel for art lovers. The premise is interesting, that our protagonist is Mona, a precocious and charming 10 year old, quietly doing her math homework, suddenly loses her sight entirely. “She felt a dark shadow fall...
Desperate women
Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, set in 1950s Mississippi and focusing on the interactions between the black household help and their white employers, was a huge success. It was made into a film that was also hugely successful. The...
Milpitas to Vegas
This novel provides a lively new angle of experience of the Filipino diaspora in California, and particularly, in Las Vegas. Filipinos have been arriving in California since the start of the 20th century, and currently actually, the American History Museum is...
Nonsense
Jane Austen wrote only six novels in her life. Each one was an exquisite microcosm of her society with all its faults and foibles. Many many authors have been so taken by her plots and descriptions that they’ve attempted to...
Neither Slow nor fast, but has momentum and delightful writing
Why We Die is the third of the Oxford-Zoe Boehm series (which has 4 books so far), and while nowhere near as good reading as the Slough House-Slow Horses series, I have run out of that series and so have to...
Wiping Out in Southern California
Taylor Jenkins Reid has both fame and fortune, as the author of the bestselling The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and also Daisy Jones and the Six, which went on to become an Amazon Prime TV series. She is prolific,...
Cocktail parties and culpability in Saigon
It seemed clear from the outset that although a large part of this book is supposedly set in Saigon, there was never going to be all that much local colour or Vietnamese culture depicted in this novel. It is very...
Wild in the water
In 1950, Gavin Maxwell moved to a cottage on the West Coast of Scotland, into a small house standing isolated near the sea. His memoir, Ring of Bright Water, about the place and the animals he shared it with, became...
Good chick lit can be fun, but this is disappointing
I only picked up this book despite its unpromising cover and title, because I had previously read Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, which despite its flaws, had a very authentic Malaysian vibe to its dialogues, which were a lot of...
Family secrets? Sisterhood? Colonialism? All of the above?
I admit to picking up this book solely because of its quirky title, expecting something along the lines of departmental shenanigans in a university Literature or Asian Studies department, and was therefore quite surprised that this novel is actually set...
When Fiction and Fact Blur
I was taken by Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence from the start, lingering over the epigraph, “From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.” –Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor...
Off the Grid
Groups of people have chosen to live in communes of one kind or another for centuries. Their rationale has been diverse: discontent with governments or the ratrace, escapes from unpleasant situations, sharing to reduce the financial burdens, or shared spiritual...
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