The Long Song by Andrea Levy is a beautifully wrought account of the last years of slavery in Jamaica, told through the stories of an old woman who mixes fact and fiction, mythology and reality, to reveal the horrors of humans owning other humans. The old woman was born a slave and named “July” as that [...]
Continue Reading →A Spell on the Water by Marjorie Kowalski Cole is a profound exploration of family, place, nature, and faith. Mary Leader, widow and mother of five, moves her family to a small lakeside resort in rural Michigan in the late 1950s, hoping to protect her children from the ugliness of the outside world and to [...]
Continue Reading →Much of the sex that goes on in The Outlander (and there is A LOT of it, and of every kind, with the exception of human/animal) does not fall within my definition of “great sex” but for time traveler Claire Beauchamp Randall, most of it does. And the great sex she finds in the Scottish [...]
Continue Reading →One wonderful perk of writing book reviews for fun and to spread the love of reading among adults (great good comes from reading great books, remember?), is that I receive free books from publishers. And when a new book by a long-beloved writer arrives in my mailbox, it is like Christmas in September (or whatever [...]
Continue Reading →The trials of family love are on full display in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marin Lewycka, along with the pains of romantic longing, sexual desire (at all ages), and insecurity (again, at all ages). Underlying it all is the wrenching history of the Ukraine, the horrors of World War II, and [...]
Continue Reading →I may be late to the table of Anne Perry admirers, but now that I am here, I am here for the full course — or rather, the full run of good courses, as Perry is adept at Victorian era, with both her William Monk series and her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, and she [...]
Continue Reading →I have my sons to thank for one of my wonderful literary adventures this summer. We were out on Long Island, spending the day canvassing the streets of Sag Harbor. My oldest son had noticed a used bookstore on our way into town and insisted that we backtrack to find it. He headed off with [...]
Continue Reading →The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill is a gothic, creepy, and weirdly topical novel about murder by mother, inspired by the true story of the death of the daughter of an aristocratic Irish family in 1892. McGill does a fine job presenting the Ireland of the time, its tensions between new ways and old superstitions, [...]
Continue Reading →In February I read and reviewed The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas. Inspired by the beauty of its portrayal of Istanbul, I began to look for other books with Istanbul as landscape. Through a friend I discovered the marvelous mysteries of Jason Goodwin. Goodwin’s Investigator Yashim novels are set in mid-nineteenth century Istanbul [...]
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