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...
Susan
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:...
Blood and Money
~ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. By John Carreyrou. Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 when she started her company in 2003. She had a squad of major-league cheerleaders — senior professors at Stanford, angel investors,...
Same difference?
~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~ This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people. Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience...
70-year slog
~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~ This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of...
Appalachian Miseries
~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~ Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young...
Tedious gangster fare
~ The Irishman. A Scorsese film. ~ De Niro. Pacino. Pesci. in a Scorsese period-piece film about the Mafia. Sounds like an entertaining way to spend an evening, right? Lauded by critics, nominated for many awards, the film is a...
Predators and Enablers
~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~ This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest. Ronan Farrow’s name and history are...
Anatomy of a Jury
Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is a difficult novel to categorize, especially at its start. A 52-year old woman in Florida becomes a member of a 6-person jury on a murder case. (Apparently, in Florida, the storied 12-person jury...
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