The O’Briens by Peter Behrens is a compelling and haunting novel about love, both familial and romantic. I caution you, Behrens’ take on love is neither gentle nor joyful. Love is temperamental and tenacious in the world of the O’Briens, and it is the framework around which all other aspects of life are explained or [...]
Continue Reading →I have reread There but for the by Ali Smith for a book group meeting tonight and I love this book even more the second time around (read my review from September 2011). How could I have missed the meaning of the title the first time? All those words are conjunctions, and as Miles, the [...]
Continue Reading →S.J. Bolton is the one responsible, yet again, for another night of too little sleep, glued as I was to her latest novel, Dead Scared. I just could not put the book down (and this has been true of every Bolton book I’ve ever read) because of its twisting plot (offering surprises at every turn), [...]
Continue Reading →I was on vacation last week and as usual for a beach vacation, I read a lot. Two mysteries, two novels, one epistolary volume, and one non-fiction, all so very different one from the other, and all good. I started the week with Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. A seventy-year old woman decides it is [...]
Continue Reading →Even with hot, humid Los Angeles as its setting, Rachel Howzell‘s latest thriller No One Knows You’re Here gave me the chills. And I mean that in the best of ways. No One Knows You’re Here is a spine-tingling novel of the highest order, demanding not only that I pay attention to the fear wrought [...]
Continue Reading →July 22, 1840 My Dear Maclise, Kate has a girl stopping here, for whom I have conceived a horrible aversion, and whom I must fly. Shall we dine together today in some sequestered pothouse….?…If nay, whither can I turn from this fearful female! She is the Ancient Mariner of young ladies. She ‘holds me with [...]
Continue Reading →Pure by Andrew Miller is a mesmerizing book, a stunner of historical fiction set in 1785 Paris, when an ambitious provincial engineer is commissioned to clear out the oldest cemetery in Paris, disposing of the bones, destroying the attendant church, and filling in the holes left behind any way he can. It quickly becomes apparent [...]
Continue Reading →Suffering post-SuperBowl, mid-winter, pre-chocolate-of-Valentine’s-Day blues? Pick up any and all of three wonderful new mysteries and escape from the blahs. All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley, Ghost Hero by S.J. Rozan, and Motor City Shakedown by D.E. Johnson provide five different sleuths (yes, Rozan gives us not one, not two, but [...]
Continue Reading →How It All Began, the new novel from Booker Prize Winner Penelope Lively can be read as a clever and fun romp, where we the reader get to play peeping tom, peeking into ordinary lives turned sideways by one incident. Charlotte, the eye of the storm, recovers from the incident in the home of Rose, [...]
Continue Reading →I love just about everything Walter Mosley writes. The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray is one of my favorite novels ever, The Tempest Tales made me laugh and think, his Easy Rawlins mysteries make me cry and think, and his most recent series, starring ex-boxer Lenoid McGill, make me smile wryly and think even more. [...]
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