One wonders who in Seattle’s history inspired author Jim Lynch’s engaging novel, Truth Like the Sun. The story begins in 1962, at the World’s Fair. The fair and its landmark, the Space Needle, are the brainchild of golden boy Roger Morgan, a man with so many ideas he can’t sleep. Once the fair catches on, all sorts of important people want to meet Roger, [...]
It’s pretty risky business for an author to flesh out a story that her audience thinks it already knows. This is the task Mette Harrison set out for herself when the wrote The Book of Laman. The book cover looks just like the Book of Mormon, and every Mormon knows that Nephi is the hero in the B of M’s first chapters, while older [...]
So, are you the sort of person who stays put? Who regularly runs into the people you went to kindergarten with? Or do you find yourself constantly searching for moving boxes, new dentists, and furniture that fits into this house as opposed to the bulky shelves that occupied the perfect spot in your last house? Melissa Dalton-Bradford is the second kind of person. The [...]
Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, is the sort of book that might dull the pain of waiting around in an airport or a hospital. The characters are not particularly memorable,wise, or likable. These people don’t handle their own modern enlightenment all that well. But even a so-so book can make you feel like you’re getting a good but [...]
The Pretty One, a novel by Lucinda Rosenfeld, reads like a grab-bag of current topics cadged right out of chick magazines. Rosenfeld populated her story with three sisters approaching middle age, yet still playing out all their old sibling rivalries. One of them is The Pretty One. Another is The Control Freak. The last is The Lesbian. Then Rosenfeld worked extra hard to stuff [...]
Confession time: I always wanted to live in California. I longed to trade the farm, where weeds grew along the pasture fences, for a house with a pool and a kitchen island. I wished for a neighborhood with tidy new houses, all tied together with a ribbon of sidewalk set off from the curvy street in perfect symmetry. I wanted to trade my town, [...]
It was an odd book this week. In Michelle Huneven’s novel, Blame, the heroine slips into the story through a side door while I’m pretty sure the story is about somebody else. But no, it’s about Patsy MacLemoore, a party-girl college professor in southern California. The alcohol gets out of hand and one day, Patsy wakes up from a blackout and learns that she [...]
Take one thirty-something modern man. Add in a wife, a job, a son. Take away the wife, and suddenly you have a man with too much to do. Sean Benning, the protagonist of Bronwen Hruska’s novel, Accelerated, goes from ordinary problems, i.e. a job he hates, to single-dad problems. He’s the only one around to praise the kid’s drawings, redirect blunt comments made in public, [...]
Jennifer McGaha, a North Carolina English professor, ran into two strokes of bad luck. I see only two upsides to this: She learned a lot She wrote a book. McGaha gave her book what must be the second-greatest title I’ve ever seen: Flat Broke with Two Goats. Who could pass that up? McGaha and her CPA husband had plenty of money, enough that they let [...]
Somewhere in the Midwest, college students who enter a certain classroom aren’t sure what to make of their professor. She’s tall, black, fat and covered in tattoos. That’s OK. Their professor, Roxane Gay, daughter of Haitian immigrants and an east-coaster to her core, doesn’t know what to make of all the cornfields. You can read her opinions in her book of essays, Bad Feminist. [...]
