Stages of grief
Three unrelated people live in a small town in Pennsylvania. Each one has lost, in some way, someone close to them. These losses have in common that they are recent, and have left the character devastated, but each one is...
Lovely, lively characters
Having loved Liardet’s first novel, We Must Be Brave, I was of course eagerly anticipating this, her second. And once again, right from the start, I found myself in the hands of a skilled storyteller. This novel was set in...
A little gem
Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These, was a little gem, and Foster is another one. A mere 76 pages, it is wonderfully complete: saying everything in just a few words, leaving enough unsaid for the reader to draw their...
An immigrant story in a lively voice
This is a rather charming novel although not entirely novel in material, about immigrants to the USA. The novel show cases immigrants from the Dominican Republic who have moved to New York in search of a better life, income, and...
A circus without magic
Surely The Circus Train contains the most incredibly sanitized description of the Holocaust ever. A description of two prisoners in the Theresienstadt Ghetto includes this line the scant diet of watery soup and moldy potatoes making it nearly impossible to...
Pain and Glory
Having been very impressed by Abbott’s The End of Everything, I was thrilled to get hold of another of her novels. This one is about ballet and ballerinas. Not a world I know anything about, but Abbott is a consummately...
What will people think?
In contrast to the immigrant parents in my last review, the Indian-American parents in Circa are very, very old-school, resist any hint of assimilation, and are strict with their teenage daughter Heera. They want their daughter to wear only Indian...
Outsidership, through the prism of friendship
Having read and loved all Kamila Shamsie’s novels, I was thrilled to get my hands on her latest, Best of Friends. Even better, the blurb suggested it was going to be a read similar to Kartography, one of Shamsie’s earlier...
Irreverent and honest
North American immigrant writing tends to be dominated by the US, so it is a pleasant variation to come across a book by an Indo-Canadian author. Scaachi Koul is in her early 30s, and a writer at Buzzfeed. This, her...
The Pennington half-siblings
This is a fun read, but not to be taken entirely seriously. It starts with an introduction of the vast cast, of Cyril Pennington’s five children and their mothers. His eldest and youngest, Nikisha and Prynce have the same Jamaican...
Bible Belt Autofiction
Autofiction is the in thing these days: a fictionalized version of the author’s own life experiences turned into a novel. In the last couple of years, I’ve read Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, and Elif Batuman, and there are many others...
Appalachian grit
This is one of those utterly charming books which conjure up a particular place and time so well that it transports the reader into that world. Set in the Appalachian mountains, this novel depicts a very deprived community in Baines...
Marble and Misery
It seems to be a season of historical fiction for me: the latest to cross my path is set in the early 1900s, in Colorado. At 17, Sylvie Pelletier is the oldest child of a Quebecois family, whose father Jacques...
Life in Translation
There have been increasing numbers of Koreans writers in English in this century, and there is no doubt that they are collectively conveying a very distinct identity for the Korean diaspora in fiction. There are themes common to many immigrant...
Jazz City by the Bay
I’d venture to guess that when most people think of San Francisco, they think of one of the following: the ’60s, with flower children and LSD; an epicenter of the gay rights revolution; or the tech era with highpriced real...
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