The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead is a story for those who love a rollicking book full of brothers and sisters. The reader will also need an appetite for some serious family dysfunction. Father Sam is the kind of dad who, if the fence needs painting, makes a party of it. But before long, the reader will notice that this tee-totaling, idea-spouting [...]
Today’s book starts with a murder in a small Illinois town. The narrator is young, too young to understand the shock and scandal whirling through little Lincoln, Illinois. He’s got pain of his own. His mother died of the Spanish flu and he lives with his brother and his mourning father as though they “had inadvertently walked through a door that [they]shouldn’t have gone [...]
Once this quarantine thing ends and I can cross state lines without my license plates attracting the wrong kind of attention, I may just break out for the scenes described in Holly Robinson’s Chance Harbor. It could take me a few days to get there. It's a marathon drive even for Robinson’s characters -- from their Boston abodes to their house by the sea [...]
Having introduced you to author Muriel Spark here and here, today we revisit with a look at her novella, The Girls of Slender Means. The scene is the May of Teck Club, a boardinghouse for young single women trying their luck in London. Life at the Club includes a dinner hour, meetings about rules and, occasionally, a guest speaker. As the title suggests, nobody [...]
Remember Asher Lev? We met him here. Since we left off with young Asher, he’s grown up and gotten famous. In Chaim Potok's sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev, we learn that the world knows him for his two paintings of the crucifixion. If you're wondering why a Jew would touch that subject, well, so does everybody else in his Brooklyn synagogue. No wonder [...]
And now for a change in our regular programming, this week we feature a story full of spraying bullets and spilling blood. Terror of Living by Urban Waite may remind you of Breaking Bad. Switch out Breaking’s Albuquerque setting for the mountains that straddle Washington state and British Columbia, add in your version of Bryan Cranston and let the troubles begin. The drug-runner protagonist [...]
“Ever wonder why 31-year old pro-quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other young people became so alienated from the freest, most generous nation in the world?” asks writer Herbert W. Stupp in the Washington Times last summer. Perhaps it’s the history book used in countless high schools and universities, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. I first heard of Zinn in this [...]
Today’s offering fits more in the YA genre, but it’s no crime for grown-ups to pull out a light read, is it? In Rosanne Perry’s Second Fiddle, Jody, Vivian and Giselle play together in a string trio at their American school in Berlin. Army brats all, this is their last year together, since moving is the Army way of life. But before they go, [...]
Author Janelle Brown wrote a book good enough to make my personal Top 10 Fiction list. Picking up a second book by Brown, This Is Where We Live, seemed like a good bet. And it was. Jeremy and Claudia buy a house. It’s looks like the next milestone for a married couple in their thirties. But there’s a catch or two. First of all, [...]
In James Anderson’s Lullaby Road, we ride along with Ben Jones, a short-haul trucker delivering water and propane to desert rats that live way too far from Wal-Mart. Ben’s route takes him past the Stop-n-Gone Truck Stop, then the Never-Open Desert Diner, and on to the gullies and ghost towns dotting Utah’s emptiest acres. If the landmarks in this novel are quirky, the characters [...]
