THE FIFTH PETAL Brunonia Barry is another contemporary author who can deftly embroider three narratives into a single story. The Fifth Petal takes place during
WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? Alan Light’s biography of Nina Simone rhetorically asks, What Happened, Miss Simone? The answer turns out to be a complicated one.
A Fine Imitation While reading Amber Brock’s novel, A Fine Imitation, I kept thinking of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Vera Longacre Bellington,
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why Trainwrecks, Sady Doyle metaphorically muses, are women who have lost
THE CHILBURY LADIES’ CHOIR When the Vicar tells the ladies of Chilbury that their church choir must disband because all the tenors and basses have
THE PARIS DIVERSION In the book world, the espionage thriller is the milieu of male readers. In other words, Chris Pavone’s latest, The Paris Diversion,
THE HIDING PLACE I could review C. J. Tudor’s novel, The Hiding Place, in just four words. Rosemary’s Baby on Steroids. Except that wouldn’t be
BRADSTREET GATE An unsettling novel with an unsettled ending, Bradstreet Gate opens on the tenth anniversary of a murder committed on the Harvard campus. Robin
The Last Secret Secrets. Be honest, don’t we have a few things that, for whatever reason, we’ve never told another person? Well, Nora Trimble Hammond,
The Clockwork Crow, first in a new series by Catherine Fisher. I feel on pretty sure ground when reviewing children’s picture books, but lacking a
The Overstory A powerful novel of environmental concepts. During the decade before I retired, I often taught “Environmental Literature,” a capstone course for graduating seniors.
Numbered Account – Reich bifurcates his novel between the intricacies of Swiss banking and one fast-paced thriller. Christopher Reich has written what I would call
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Baldwin and Glaude, rereading Baldwin to arrive at Glaude’s writing and thinking today.
A Promised Land. A recollection and re-analyzation of Barack Obama’s campaigns for political office, through his first term as President. In A Promised Land, Barack
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