In this week’s read, we drop into a land of sea and wind, of frost on your blanket when you wake up and, just before the biggest storms, of Northern Lights. In other words, Iceland. The place names in Hannah Kent’s novel, Burial Rites, will twist your tongue and challenge your eyesight. Go ahead and try a couple: Breidabolstadur. Geitaskard. Before our story begins, [...]
In the tradition of Wicked”s filling-out of The Wizard of Oz, this week we bring you While Beauty Slept, Elizabeth Blackwell’s well-imagined treatment on Sleeping Beauty. The heroine is Elise, a poor farm girl whose father has a special reason to despise and mistreat her. As the farm’s fortunes descend to worse than bad, Elise finds the means to travel to the castle and [...]
Let’s list some things I never knew about Ethiopia: 1. It’s scenic. Or it was at the time of the story. 2. The Italians colonized it. 3. The Italians left behind some neat buildings, adding to that scenery. 4. It’s had some trouble with dictators and revolutionaries. No, wait. I knew that. Or rather, I presumed. Don’t all 3rd-World countries have that kind of [...]
In Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, we have what we might call the plotless novel. An elderly preacher writes a journal to his seven-year-old son who, were it not for all these pages, will never know him. I mean, it’s beautifully written, sometimes too wifty-woo beautiful. But is that all we have here? A father explaining old history, old friendships, how-I-met-your-mother? Of all the books [...]
The action starts when an aging Brit picks up the phone and hears a mysterious voice on the other end: “Remember you must die.” Pretty soon, multiple characters in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori receive these pesky calls. I wasn’t sure I would like a book filled with wrinkly oldsters taking tea and answering nuisance calls. But it wasn’t long before Dame Lettie, Mrs. Pettigrew [...]
In case you don’t have much attention span this week, maybe you could try Barry Gifford’s collection of short stories, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings. I mean, these are short-shorts, and no fancy words. Fancy talk wouldn’t sound right, describing the Chicago neighborhood where a tween boy named Roy and his friend Jimmy Boyle tramp the sidewalks, on their way to a [...]
If I ever do another Top 10 List of Books, The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood will be on it. I loved this story of an eleven-year-old boy, earning a scout merit badge by helping out Ona Vitkus, the old lady in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the boy dies (now that I think of it, Wood never gave him a name) and his father, Quinn, [...]
Mothers, by Brit Bennett, is the story of Nadia Turner, the local bad girl, a golden-skinned black, too pretty for her own good. Add in a boy, a washed-up football hero, whose pecs look so good she can ignore the slight limp. Add in an unlikely friendship with Aubrey, the straightest arrow in town Add in Nadia’s father, who loans his truck to The [...]
Author Jhumpa Lahiri has appeared on this blog before, here and here. I like her enough to return for another helping, a short story collection this time, Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri writes about Indian expats in America. Her characters live in Boston suburbs, in Connecticut towns. In these stories, we see a couple grieving a stillborn baby, a wife too timid to drive on American [...]
If you like your books thick with history, royalty and a touch of romance, Elizabeth Fremantle’s Queen’s Gambit may be for you. The novel opens as Katherine Parr, a 16-century Englishwoman, nurses her second husband through his dying breaths. As soon as she gets the fellow buried, she hears rumors that King Henry the 8th is single and looking. Specifically, he’s looking at her. [...]
