This week’s book, See Also Murder, by Larry D. Sweazy, came to me as a pass-along from a friend. For those of you who like to outwit your mystery authors and guess the murderer four chapters before the end, I offer to hand it over to you. But I will want to hear if the denouement denoue-ed for you. The narrator is Marjorie Trumaine, [...]
I think once you pick up Sharon Guskin’s The Forgetting Time, the action will pull you through at a good pace. So I’ll get you started by setting up who you’ll be reading about: — Janie, a woman who just wants to have a special 39th birthday. — Dr. Anderson, a psychiatrist diagnosed with a degenerative disease. — Noah, a little boy who fights [...]
In Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, Katey slips into an exhibit at the art museum. As she and her husband gaze at the photos on display, she sees the face of an old boyfriend, which transports her back to 1938. That was the year Katey, a working-class girl from the outer boroughs, escaped to Manhattan for the typing-pool, rooming-house, jazz-club-hopping life. Isn’t this every [...]
The gears grind a little slow at the start of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, Maybe in Another Life. But once the reader gets past an overstuffed exposition, the plot takes off at a good canter. The main character, Hannah Martin, returns to her home city (L.A.) just as she’s staring age 30 in the face. She meets a few high school friends at a [...]
I listened to a famous podcaster this week. He recently spoke to an audience of young people. He asked them what they wished for most of all. "Fame," they all said. "What do you want to be famous for?" "It doesn't matter." So here’s their novel (do these kids still read?): The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne. Whether it stokes or [...]
This week, we have mystery on the reading shelf. In Watch Me Disappear, author Janelle Brown introduces us to teenaged Olive Flanagan, coming up on the 1-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Mother Billie went hiking (by herself) and never returned. All they found was her crushed cell phone and one hiking boot. Father Jonathan is still getting used keeping the house stocked with milk [...]
Ah, writer research. There’s a ton of books I read which I never review here. Oh, you hear about them eventually, in the form of characters and their psychological wounds. But what’s a good Mormon girl to do when she needs to describe some of the trashy, terrible things that happen to people? Hitchhike to Oregon, showering at truck stops in every state? Drive [...]
This week, our book is set in San Francisco in 1906. If you know your history, that date should shiver your spine. Mercy Wong, the heroine of Stacey Lee’s Outrun the Moon, grows up in Chinatown. Her greatest wish is to attend the St. Clare’s School for Girls. Good luck with that, Mercy. That’s a school for rich girls. Rich white girls, and Mercy [...]
Take one paraplegic veteran. Buy him a diner. Add in a waitress that wants to manage not only his lunch counter but his life. Look out the window and watch an eighteen-wheeler truck drop off a drifter woman carrying a lame dog. Mix in a confused Vietnamese refugee, the town bully, the town gossip, the clink of diner forks against diner plates, frequent fresh [...]
Do you recall that summer afternoon you spread a blanket under a tree, laid out your snack of crackers stolen from the kitchen and opened up Don Quixote, whiling away the hours as old Don swashbuckled his way through the countryside? What? You never made it through Don Quixote? All right then. Let me try this again. Do you recall that summer afternoon you [...]
