Delightful, and never dull
Such a long title for these 2 short stories, which come to just a little over 100 pages in all. This will not be a review which is demanding or interrogating, because much of the pleasure of reading a Mary...
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...
Atrocity
There are all too few novels written in English on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1942-1945, so I seized on this one and read it avidly. It certainly tells a very important story, though how...
But never doubt I love
The novel starts by telling us that Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. O’Farrell’s novel is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s life, without ever mentioning...
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...
Charming and distinctive
Although this is one of Toibin’s earlier novels, I had not previously read it; but it felt instantly familiar nevertheless, with his distinctive style. This one is set in Toibin’s own birth county, Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. It...
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...
From Shock and Awe to…LOL
Note: There are no spoilers in this review because, well, it’s just not a Donne thing, to borrow a cheesy line from Anwar, the ‘hero’ of Syed M. Masood’s The Bad Muslim Discount. Spanning continents and decades, encompassing themes of...
Lovable characters described by a born storyteller
I looked for this book because of my huge enjoyment of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, co-authored by Annie Barrows, and her aunt, Marry Anne Shaffer. I just knew Barrows would be a good storyteller, and I...
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...
Code of Silence
The title of this book comes from the IRA’s mantra that all its cadres are taught that when captured and questioned, they are to stonewall, to say nothing. It also is at the heart of one of the many stories...
She’d rather have you laugh at her than feel sorry for her
Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn. No shortage of fodder there....
Shades of Difference
In 1848, Alphonse Decuir, a freed slave, inherited sugarcane fields from his white father. On those acres, Decuir wanted to build [a] town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like...
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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