Coal Black Horse
Robert Olmstead has given us a little literary gem in Coal Black Horse, the tale of fourteen year old Robey Childs, who has been sent by his mother to go to the battlefield to bring his father home.The tone and content of Olmstead’s story is almost mystical. Robey’s mother, left to run the farm while […]
Gertrude Stein Has Arrived
GERTRUDE STEIN HAS ARRIVED In 1933-34, just after Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to great acclaim, the writer and her faithful companion went on a celebratory tour of the United States. Although Gertrude was born in Oakland and Alice in San Francisco, neither had been in America for roughly three decades. […]
An American Marriage
AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE Think of marriage as a lovely pond, surrounded by flora and fauna (family and friends). Then think of someone throwing a rather large rock into the pond. Can you see the water move almost violently away from where the rock falls? And the ripples? Can you see them moving ever outward until […]
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes is a most singular novel and one that will stick with the reader for a long time after the last page. It’s appeal is a conundrum, a puzzlement that is best left alone. But it is a testament to Clarke’s prowess as a storyteller that we care deeply for […]
The Current
THE CURRENT I just finished reading another “Bookin’ with Sunny” novel that I couldn’t put down. Tim Johnston’s The Current, a mystery thriller that careens from page to page, begins when a car skids on an icy highway, then pauses on a snowbank above a frozen river. Two terrified college coeds sit shivering, thanking their […]
Paris Was Ours
Paris Was Ours. Thirty-two beautifully illuminated expatriate memoirs recalling their time in the City of Lights. Paris Was Ours projects a joie de vivre that really is a joie de Paris. Subtitled “Thirty-two Writers Reflect on the City of Light,” Paris Was Ours collects an array of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century observations and considerations […]
West of Sunset
Stewart O’Nan’s novel, West of Sunset, mirrors perfectly the frenetic ennui of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and his fiction. West of Sunset tells the story of Fitzgerald’s final years, when he worked on a number of Hollywood films, conducted a notorious affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and started an unfinished manuscript, (The Love of) […]
This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! I’m not sure you must be over the age of seventy to read This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, but I’m pretty sure it can’t hurt. Most books generating a sit-down-and-read-and-don’t-get-up-until-the-end are exciting, nail-biting, plot-twisting, or surprisingly erotic. None of which is true for this fourth novel by California-born, […]
The Atomic Weight of Love – Los Alamos Revisited
THE ATOMIC WEIGHT OF LOVE Elizabeth J. Church, who grew up in Los Alamos during the 1950s, writes an addendum to her novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, where she admits that she always wondered about the inner lives of her mother’s friends. In those days, the wives of Los Alamos couldn’t pursue their own […]
The Puzzle King
Occasionally I read a book that’s just too short. That’s the problem with Betsy Carter’s The Puzzle King. It could easily be fifty or a hundred pages longer. On the plus side, that leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination. After I finished this novel, I found myself tracing further encounters and future episodes, picturing […]
Mudbound
MUDBOUND Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound, carries the reader back to a 1940s Mississippi rife with hatred, prejudice, and bigotry. Since the first chapter opens with a burial, the reader knows the novel won’t end well, but only discovers the details of the racial conflict as the narrative unfolds. Through the voices of six divergent narrators, […]
The Second Mrs. Hockaday
The Second Mrs. Hockaday, a book club favorite Belonging to the Clayton Community Library Book Club has its perks. Members now spread the wealth by bringing in books they’ve read and want to share. That’s how I got a copy of Susan Rivers’ debut novel, The Second Mrs. Hockaday. Lucky me! Rivers has written one […]
The High Divide
Lin Enger sends The High Divide characters into a sequence of improbable, nearly impossible situations. The novel takes place in 1886, when the West was still largely unsettled and when a man might make something of himself, somehow, somewhere. On the first page of The High Divide, Ulysses Pope, married for seventeen years, father of […]
Courting Mr. Lincoln
Courting Mr. Lincoln, two points of view. The double entendre of Louis Bayard’s title, Courting Mr. Lincoln, immediately alerts the reader to the duality of the novel’s subject matter. History tells us that one of the narrators, Mary Todd, was indeed courting the future president as much as Abraham Lincoln was courting her. The second […]