The Girls in the Picture
The Girls in the Picture Ordinarily, before reading The Girls in The Picture I focus a review of a biographical novel on the lives and times of the characters, most often considering how effectively the author managed to fictionalize known facts and to extrapolate scenes and conversations. While I was reading Melanie Benjamin’s The Girls […]
Defending Jacob
Last evening I was talking with two poet friends about the term ‘niche writer.’ We agreed that formula prose is a lesser sort of creation, like a pulp western or a Harlequin romance. Niche is nicer, describing a Viet Nam poet, perhaps, or a novelist who writes about the eighteenth century, someone who has found […]
Night School
NIGHT SCHOOL – JACK REACHER AND CLASSMATES? Night School, Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel, isn’t the first I’ve reviewed for “Bookin’ with Sunny’ and probably won’t be the last. For a variety of reasons, I genuinely enjoy these thrillers. Childs always sends his protagonist into an inventive but plausible real-world situation. He does so […]
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
I HADN’T MEANT TO TELL YOU THIS The beginning of friendships in our formative years as children shape the people we grow up to be. Often, we reflect on friends with whom we created joyous memories. But what about troubled friendships, friendships that challenged us, and made us think about people who were different from […]
Alice I Have Been
Can you remember when you first read Alice in Wonderland? Ever wonder about Alice? Or how Mr. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) came to write such a wacky and riotous tale? Alice I Have Been is an intriguing biographical novel of Alice Liddell and begins when Alice Hargreaves, nee Liddell, at age eighty, reflects on her […]