Review The Darkest Child is a powerful novel you’ve probably never heard of, but it’s not for everyone. Set in the early 1950s in rural Georgia in the U.S., this novel presents a picture of life during the Jim Crow era, when formal laws and societal conventions reinforced racial segregation in the South. The story […]
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Introduction Here are two more novels I read in April. Since almost all of the books on my TBR shelf now relate to Life Stories in Literature, it’s not surprising that they share many of the same themes. In his 2020 novel The Boy from the Woods, Coben introduced Wilde, who had been found living
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Falling by T.J. Newman Simon & Schuster, 2021Hardcover, 304 pagesISBN 978-1-9821-7788-1 When Bill Hoffman arrives at Los Angeles International Airport to pilot Coastal Airways flight 416 to New York, he expects a routine day. It’s not until the plane is in the air that he learns today will be anything but routine. When he receives
“There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single ‘reliable’ narrator, I often wonder; is this the whole story? What could be missing here? Truth is often a multiplicity of perspectives, and sometimes the more viewpoints and versions of events there
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Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84Trans. by Jay Rubin & Philip GabrielVintage, translation © 2011Trade Paperback, 1,157 pagesISBN 978-0-307-47646-3 Highly Recommended “ A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is
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Connelly, Michael. The Dark HoursLittle, Brown & Company, © 2021Narrated by Titus Welliver, Christine LakinISBN 978-1-549-10763-4 Recommended There’s chaos in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve. Working her graveyard shift, LAPD Detective Renée Ballard seeks shelter at the end of the countdown to wait out the traditional rain of lead as hundreds of revelers shoot their
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In this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation I expressed my love for big, sprawling family sagas. I think that love is one part of my motivation for choosing We Are the Brennans as my July 2021 Book of the Month book. Another motivator was Joyce Carol Oates’s memorable novel We Were the Mulvaneys (scroll down
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A big-hearted coming-of-age epic The significance of a life lies not only in the living, but also in the telling. William Kent Krueger brings this truth to literary life in his magnificent novel This Tender Land. Throughout, the voice of the narrator breaks through not only to tell us the story of his experiences, but
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Imagine a phone call featuring an electronic voice telling you that your child has been kidnapped and you need to pull together some huge sum of money to get the child back unharmed. I used to think that would be one of the most horrifying calls parents could ever receive. But I was wrong, as
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To help me break out of a reading slump at the onset of the COVID-19 health emergency, I turned to the books I’ve always trusted to draw me in: thrillers. These three books were among the first I read at that time. While you can never go wrong with a book by Harlan Coben, the
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