What Goes Through the Mind of a Man
~ 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...
Susan
1.5 millions tons per second
~ 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...
Upscale navel-gazing
~ 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...
Survival and Resilience
~ 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...
Enigmas
~ 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...
Grief and Redemption
~ 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...
Quarantine Art
Limited sources Quarantine stretches forward With weekends to fill. Slices of tree trunk. A grove of bamboo nearby. Calder-esque notions.
Dark Whimsy
~ 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...
Tribal Threads
~ The Round House, by Louise Erdrich ~ Joe Coutts is an only child in an unusually (by his description) stable and happy Indian (Native American) family on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. His mother parses the bloodlines and...
Abduction ripples through a community
~ Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips ~ This riveting novel starts with two young girls on a beach, occupying themselves while their mother is at work. Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s...
Race Relations Mysteries
Black Water Rising, and The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke Houston-born Attica Locke is a screenwriter and director who started writing novels in 2009. Her first two novels, Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season are in the mystery-noir genre,...
Overdone Swedish Satire
~ The 100-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson ~ The title and author of this novel immediately suggest a quirkily delightful Scandinavian story, along the lines of A Man Called Ove. Indeed, the...
Anguished Deliberations
~ Women Talking, by Miriam Toews ~ Agency and self-determination. That’s what the Mennonite women in Miriam Toews’ powerful novel struggle towards over the course of the book, despite the patriarchy, religious, and community culture stacked against them. Mennonites are...
Secrets and Lies
~ Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff ~ A beautiful young couple walk along a New England beach. They had secretly married that morning, and are focused entirely on each other. They make love in the dunes. He longed for...
Oscar Shorts
The big films get all the Oscar buzz. People argue about whether The Irishman should have got something and whether Saiorse Ronan deserved it more than Renee Zellweger and whether the Oscars discriminate against female directors and women-oriented films (me:...
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