A lost generation
In 1985, at the beginning of this novel, several young men attend a memorial wake in Chicago. This is not a standard memorial service; it is a party, held at the same time as the official funeral several miles away....
Susan
Redemption Song
Say the word ‘Rastafarian’, and many people will think of Bob Marley and reggae. Beyond the catchy, unmistakeable rhythm of the songs, few people in America, including myself, know much about the Rastafari religion. Safiya Sinclair’s arresting new memoir, How...
Things Fall Apart
Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls was a wonderful collection of short stories (see Reeta’s review), but it’s a big step from short stories to a full-length novel, and not every novelist can do it well. Freudenberger, however, is one of those...
Books are dangerous! They can open your mind!
A novel not just about libraries or bookstores, but specifically about a Little Free Library! Who could resist? Well, not me at least. Set in a small Georgia town, this novel hits every one of the cultural hot-button issues of...
Deception in Enniscorthy and Lindenhurst
When we left Eilis at the end of Colm Toibin’s lovely Brooklyn, she had just departed the small Irish town of Enniscorthy to return to her husband in New York; the Italian husband that no one in Ireland knew about,...
How strange a world that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality
I said these kinds of things were adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published 1884 So says Huck Finn during the raft journey down the Mississippi in a book that is...
Character studies of ladies and gentlemen, though not in Moscow
A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway were both lovely pieces of historical fiction. They have...
After the war, soldiering on for freedom and a livelihood
Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, was quite delightful. Her second, The Summer Before the War, had a charming cover but the novel itself did not live up to either its cover or Simonson’s first novel. Has she...
Black enough?
Thelonious Ellison is an academic and a writer of fiction. He is also black, and unfortunately, his books do not conform to the publishing industry’s idea of black writing. A typical response from a reviewer: The novel is finely crafted,...
Looking away from injustice, until it’s one of your own
Over the last few years, many damning reports and videos of police brutality and bias against African-Americans have emerged and been disseminated via the internet, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. Some parts of the Indian-American community stayed out of...
Her Mind Moves Upon Silence*
Books and movies about sports are abundant, and tend to follow a certain pattern: hero (or more rarely heroine) is unusually talented, faces hurdles, is set back at some point, but eventually triumphs over adversity, winning trophies and learning (and...
Outsiders in America
Driss Guerraoui dies in a hit-and-run accident in a small California Mojave town. Driss is a Moroccan immigrant, so there are inevitable threads of racism running through his backstory and the investigation of his death, and through the reactions of...
Interior monologues in upstate New York
Richard Russo’s trilogy of books set in North Bath, upstate New York, follows the familiar themes of many of his novels: absent fathers, resentful sons, and resulting trauma that continues from generation to generation. His Empire Falls was set in...
A protagonist even more dogged than her van
The Dog of the North caught my eye entirely because of its title. Was this a Jack London-ish adventure novel in the Yukon? Or was this slang for something entirely different? In fact, the title turns out to be the...
1/3 of a WWII story, but another 2/3 of tedium
A Town Like Alice drifted across my library page, and having heard it was Australian author Nevil Shute’s most famous book, I thought I should give it a shot. Structurally, the book is a clunker. It’s framed around a solicitor’s...
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