Gods on Earth
It is a cliché that everything is bigger in Texas. In fact, so big as to be Olympian. So goes the conceit of this novel. Set in a fictional town called Olympus, halfway between Houston and Austin, in a sprawling...
Susan
Multi-threaded Roman fabric
Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped...
Juvenile writing
“Noriko, promise me that you will obey in all things. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are...
Fish and chips and a slice of life
Here is a list of things Majella, the twenty-something year old Big Girl at the center of this novel, likes: Eating Dallas (except for the 1985-6 season, also known as Bobby’s Dream) UK Gold [this TV channel?] Her da Her...
A less mythical frontier story
In the 1900s, authors like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour rode the peak of the ‘Western’ genre with their enormous output. These books typically featured tough, sharp-shooting, quick-on-the-draw white men with beautiful horses who rode the wild country of the...
You gotta be twice as good
There’s a recent spate of American novels which expose the toxic reality of apparently exciting jobs. The Nanny Diaries featured a young white woman working as a nanny for wealthy New Yorkers, and revealed that the employers were jealous, self-centered,...
The seedy underbelly of the model minority
It is no secret that the Indian-American middle class community is ambitious and competitive. Immigrants with professional backgrounds and advanced degrees who arrive in a new country typically push their children to even higher achievements. Many novels have described the...
Idealism and apathy in a turbulent political period
In apartheid South Africa, the ruling white party created Bantustans, or ‘black homelands’, with the goal of migrating the entire black population out of their own homeland into these barren areas according to their assigned tribal definition. The Zulus would...
A smaller, sadder tree in Brooklyn
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beloved American classic. Its story of an Irish-American girl growing up in poverty in 1900s Brooklyn has charmed readers for over 80 years. Tomorrow will be better is one of Smith’s...
Matted Sin City Tapestry
Las Vegas is famous for its excess — money! lights! shows! gambling! entertainment! tourists! It seems somehow appropriate that Paradise, Nevada, set in the area containing the Las Vegas Strip, is also excessive — in this case, with an overload...
Boiler plate sexism
Half the fun of visiting a new place is reading a book set in that area. So when I was in Long Island, New York, recently, I picked up a recommended book by Nelson DeMille. Page Two gives the reader...
Goodnight, sweet prince
The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify...
A diversity of American Muslims
Growing up in Karachi, Anvar was the rebellious, non-conformist kid in the family, snarkily resenting his perfect older brother Aamir. [Aamir] has gone through life checking all the right boxes that a model desi boy should check. […] Somehow he’s...
A chronicle of familial mental illness
At first, the Galvins of Hidden Valley Road, Colorado, seemed to be like any other family, albeit an unusually large one — Don and Mimi Galvin had 10 boys followed by 2 girls. This was exactly what they wanted. “The...
Cosy Québécois mystery
I first came across Louise Penny in the pages of the Washington Post; her ‘cosy’ mysteries have a large following. Personally, I found her Kingdom of the Blind rather disappointing. That was the 14th book in her series, though, so...
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