The Children’s Crusade
Shrewd and subtle are two adjectives I would use to describe Ann Packer’s novel, The Children’s Crusade, which traces several decades of dysfunctional California family life. Her subject matter could easily be treated with a heavy hand, but Packer resists the obvious. Instead, she writes with understated deftness. I often find that familial angst novels […]
Nomadland, Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
NOMADLAND An eye-opening book of investigative journalism, Nomadland explores the terrain traveled by those who are houseless—not homeless, houseless—men and women who live year-round in one kind of vehicle or another. Some live this way by choice, but Jessica Bruder, the author of Nomadland, focuses on those who have been forced by economic circumstances to […]
Miss Garnet’s Angel/The City of Fallen Angels
MISS GARNET’S ANGEL and THE CITY OF FALLEN ANGELS Since the coronavirus has curtailed travel this year, books must take us to new and different destinations. I recently spent several days in Venice, first reading Salley Vickers’ novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, and then John Berendt’s nonfiction portrait, The City of Falling Angels. Together, the two […]
The Blue Bear
The Blue Bear, A True Story of Friendship and Discovery in the Alaskan Wild. A one-of-a-kind story of breadth and depth. The subtitle of Lynn Schooler’s The Blue Bear neatly summarizes its content. A True Story of Friendship and Discovery in the Alaskan Wild. The subtitle does not, however, convey the intensity of Schooler’s writing, […]
Pirate King
Pirate King is Laurie R. King’s eleventh Sherlock Holmes novel, starring Mary Russell. My Bantam trade paperback copy of the book contains a special treat—the reprinting of a short story that was King’s original introduction of the duo. In that story, Beekeeping for Beginners, a crotchety, depressed, newly-retired Holmes narrates his first meeting with young […]
A Man in Uniform
The back cover describes Kate Taylor’s A Man in Uniform as a “book deeply engaging for readers of mysteries as well as upmarket historical fiction.” This assessment is absolutely correct. A Man in Uniform retells some of the repercussions of the Dreyfus affair, an infamous real-life incident of treason and intrigue that incarcerated an innocent […]
Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance
Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance An appellation articulated and coined in the twenty-first century, “bromance” well describes Gyles Brandreth’s recent novel about Oscar Wilde and his friend Robert Sherard in the late nineteenth century. As in contemporary bromances, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance features an intimate but platonic relationship […]
Sun Going Down
While I am reading a book that I plan to review, I am constantly thinking of words and phrases that might best describe the author’s presentation. Turning the pages of Jack Todd’s Sun Going Down, I came up with ‘homespun family saga of the American West.’ I was delighted to find, at the end of […]
East of the Sun
East of the Sun Julia Gregson’s novel, East of the Sun, invites her readers to join the “fishing fleet.” I happily did so, and thus escaped into an exotic early twentieth-century milieu. The “fishing fleet” is a pejorative term describing those marriageable British women who sailed to India in search of husbands. East of the […]