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28 02, 2021

Oh, I’ve Got a Golden Ticket

By |2021-02-28T18:59:18-05:00February 28th, 2021|good fiction|0 Comments

Would you do it? Would you “nick a cheque" made out to somebody else, if you saw a way to do the deed undetected? If you were short on cash? If you had a grudge against the payee? Natalie, the thirty-something protagonist of Deborah Moggach’s novel, Final Demand, decides that she will do it. Toughs in her neighborhood just bashed out her car window. [...]

3 01, 2021

The Schoolmaster in the Provinces

By |2021-01-03T17:57:53-05:00January 3rd, 2021|good fiction|1 Comment

May I recommend to you Mr. Joe Lunn, the schoolmaster at the center of William Cooper’s novel, Scenes from Provincial Life. Joe is a lovable laggard, always looking to get out of any actual work in that schoolroom. (You might learn his tricks for keeping teenage boys busy, leaving their master free to contemplate the plot of his next novel.) The bright spot in [...]

27 12, 2020

Loopy but Likable

By |2020-12-27T17:50:49-05:00December 27th, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

It all begins with a mysterious envelope handed to Ricky Rice, bus station janitor. There’s a note inside: “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. Time to honor it.” There’s also a bus ticket to Vermont. Ricky, the protagonist of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine, has little to lose. And you know he can get to a bus without any trouble at all. [...]

13 12, 2020

A Safe Trip Back to High School

By |2020-12-13T20:02:28-05:00December 13th, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

It’s time for a light and airy story, don’t you think? Tell Me Three Things, by Julie Buxbaum, qualifies, even if its heroine, Jessie Holmes, has just escaped a rough year or two. By the time we meet her, she’s lost her mom to cancer. Her father remarries, one of those meet-online, get-hitched-fast things, and Jessie finds herself leaving Chicago behind, landing in the [...]

6 12, 2020

Darkness at Whenever

By |2020-12-06T19:39:41-05:00December 6th, 2020|good fiction, Uncategorized|0 Comments

In Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov paces in his Soviet prison cell awaiting his “liquidation.” As he habitually wiped his pince-nez clean, I read with a restlessness that most likely blocked me from picking up the more intricate plot points. Why do you sit here with a book? Why don’t you do something to push back our own Darkness at [...]

18 10, 2020

Meet Your AirBnB Hostess

By |2020-10-18T18:37:24-05:00October 18th, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

I don’t think you can be a bigger fan of AirBnB than I am. Vacations mean not only new roads, new restaurants, new photos in the camera, but playing house in somebody else’s totally clean and decorated home. My house is never all-the-way clean, just keep-up clean. And as for decorated, ha-ha, not my gift. I was in this blissful state just weeks ago, [...]

20 09, 2020

Girl Takes on the New World

By |2020-09-20T19:41:37-05:00September 20th, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

The purpose of teenage children, at least in our family, was to go out and find a part-time job, then entertain us around the dinner table with their work stories. One daughter waited tables at a pizza parlor. This was an authentic pizza joint, mind you. The owners put their fingers together and shook them, just like you see in the movies. And this [...]

6 09, 2020

Romance in the White Mountains

By |2020-09-06T15:20:49-05:00September 6th, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

Single woman inherits house in picturesque setting. Also, meets a guy. A Hallmark movie expert whom I know well says they all launch just like Tabitha King’s novel, Pearl. If only I watched Hallmark, I’d know these things. As it is, I catch snippets of the fall-in-love sagas as I pass through my house, distributing the mail or hunting for candy. The thing about [...]

23 08, 2020

The Master on His Deathbed

By |2020-08-23T18:59:43-05:00August 23rd, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

“Old boy, you’ve got forty-eight hours,” says the physician to the protagonist of Muriel Barbery’s slim novel Gourmet Rhapsody. The patient is a famous food critic. “I have, for all eternity, pinned to my list of discoveries some of the most prestigious butterflies among practicing chefs.” This was a guy who could make you or break you, and now he lies in his bed, [...]

2 08, 2020

Hey, Kids, Don’t Do That

By |2020-08-02T15:54:58-05:00August 2nd, 2020|good fiction|0 Comments

In the opening pages of Donna Tartt’s Little Friend, a Mississippi family gathers for a Mother’s Day feast and, before Mama can find "the good napkins," one of the children dies in a horrible accident. The story picks up again when Harriet, an infant at the time of the tragedy, is just old enough to ride her bike around town unaccompanied. And she’s mighty [...]

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