~ Where’d You Go, Bernadette. By Maria Semple. ~ The preamble to this novel identifies the protagonist. The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for...
~ Mum and Dad, by Joanna Trollope ~ Southern Spain. A middle-aged English expatriate couple, Gus and Monica, purchase some land and set up a vineyard. They abandon their oldest children in boarding schools in England, bring the youngest with...
~ Indian MatchMaking, on Netflix ~ If the pandemic has already lowered your spirits, I recommend staying well away from ‘Indian MatchMaking’, streaming on Netflix. Its portrayal of the Indian and Indian-American community is thoroughly depressing. The reality TV series...
Good Boy. My Life in Seven Dogs. by Jennifer Finney Boylan What a charming notion, to trace one’s life through the dogs in one’s past. The title of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s novel is immediately captivating to a dog-lover. Within two...
~ The Vanishing Half. By Brit Bennett ~ This year, especially, the profound overt and subtle effects of race on life in America have exploded into broad daylight. If it were possible, how many people would choose to be a...
~ Braised Pork, by An Yu ~ This debut novel by An Yu starts with a bang. Jia Jia walks into the bathroom to ask her husband which scarf he prefers, and finds him dead in the bath. She does...
~ Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler ~ Micah Mortimer is such a realistic character that he might as well live next door. (As it happens, he lives not very far from me, in Baltimore). He’s...
~ Pompeii, by Robert Harris ~ To most of us, the title of this book has only one meaning: the city near Naples that was buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Indeed, that is the event at...
~ All Adults Here, by Emma Straub ~ This is not an ambitious, sweeping novel. It is a small story set in a small place: Clapham, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, an essentially well-to-do little town, the kind of place...
~ Little Family, by Ishmael Beah ~ Somewhere in Africa, in a clearing on the edge of a small town, a boy sits among the grasses, motionless, unresponsive, looking into the distance. When you look again to where the boy...
~ The Unseen World, by Liz Moore ~ The first few pages of The Unseen World suggest a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances. Ada is 13, living in Boston with her father, a dedicated intellectual...
~ LaRose, by Louise Erdrich ~ As with all good writing, each novel in Erdrich’s Justice trilogy can stand on its own. Set in and around a Native American reservation in North Dakota, they are loosely linked stories featuring an...
Limited sources Quarantine stretches forward With weekends to fill. Slices of tree trunk. A grove of bamboo nearby. Calder-esque notions.
~ Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi ~ Not an easy novel to slot into a genre, Gingerbread is a dense confection of magical realism, fairy tale (Grimm’s, definitely not the saccharine or sanitized kind), surrealism, and fantasy, with a talented, irrepressible...
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