Pioneer Woman
~ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser ~ Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs. Many...
No time for social niceties
~ The Hunger, by Alma Katsu ~ This historical fiction novel tells the story of families of pioneers in wagon trains setting out from Springfield, Illinois, on 15th April 1846, attempting to reach California for a new life. The novel...
Atmospheric Enchantment
~ The Silver Dark Sea, by Susan Fletcher ~ This novel of Fletcher’s has a few distinctive elements in common with some of her other novels, like the House of Glass, and Let Me Tell You About A Man I...
The Iliad: as retold by women
~ The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker. ~ It must have been more than 20 years ago when Pat Barker kindly granted me an interview in my MA research. I was then studying her earlier novels in juxtapositon...
Motherhood
~ The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling ~ Motherhood is tough when money is tight, when the parent is effectively single and has little family support. Yet, as most mothers know, there are private pleasures in a baby’s unique, special...
Intimacy in China: Changing with the times
Xinran is a British Chinese journalist who has lived in UK for more than two decades. She has recorded the stories of literally hundreds of women in China, and given voice to the trials and tribulations, sufferings and sorrows of...
Hockey Madness
~ Beartown/Us Against You, by Fredrik Backman ~ Beartown is a heartbreaking novel about cruelty and sports. The eponymous town in this powerful novel by Fredrik Backman is a remote backwoods place with one focus: its ice hockey team. Boys...
Tropical Disappointment
~Ponti, by Sharlene Teo ~ The name of this novel (set in Singapore) is an abbreviation of “pontianak”, a Malay/Indonesian word denoting a ghost, or a monster; a femme fatale which usually preys on men, and is usually depicted with...
The Gentle Gaborone Gumshoe
The (first) No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is probably one of the most charming detective novels ever. Set in Botswana, it featured Precious Ramotswe, 34 years old, with a small inheritance and no detective experience, but plenty of common sense....
Shaadi Stories
Can there be anything more to say about Indian weddings? Hindi films have ended with happy, ornate weddings forever, and there are dozens of films which are entirely about weddings. A gazillion books have covered “arranged” and “love” marriages in...
Coming of age in Silicon Valley
Young parents who separated soon after her birth, a father who denied paternity and only paid child support under duress, and a mother who was barely scraping by would add a whole new level of complexity to anyone’s coming-of-age memoir....
The unusually talented Mr Swift
~ A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne ~ Maurice Swift is an ambitious novelist with a unfortunate limitation: he is good with words, but has no ideas for plots. He is extraordinarily handsome, though, and both men and...
The Immigrant Generational Divide
~ Number One Chinese Restaurant, by Lillian Li ~ Joining other recent debut novels by Asian/Chinese American authors such as Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart, 2017) Lily Wang (Family Trust, 2018), Lillian Li’s novel also purports to examine relationships and family...
Asian Cliches: Materialism and Pragmatism
~ Family Trust, by Kathy Wang ~ This novel predominantly set in the Bay Area – though it is also partially sited in Hong Kong, Bali, etc. – features elite Asian Americans who attended Ivy League universities and hold high-paying...
Rough Roads
~ Winter’s Bone ~ Book and Movie ~ Daniel Woodrell’s slim, bleakly powerful novel Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks, in a house where the road “has got rough to where you about can’t call it a road no...
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