I was drawn to this book when I learned it featured a student of music from Indiana University in the 1970s who grew up in East Tennessee and moved back there. Having lived for a time in both places, I was interested. For me it was Knoxville in the late 1960s and Bloomington in the 1970s. Livia, the main character, grew up in a troubled family in the hills of East Tennessee and escaped by way of...
Another wonderful book. I quickly came to love and care for the main character, Magnolia. When the book opens, she is crawling around on the sticky floor of a restaurant in a mall in Miami to avoid being shot by a young man intent on destroying as many people as possible. She and the others in the restaurant hear more gunfire, then instructions by police getting them out of the building. She is...
I was eager to read this, having loved The Magnificent Ruins and I found there was much to enjoy. The family connections were unusual and interesting: the narrator is Mira. Her mother was separated from her father who remarried and nine years after Mira was born, had a daughter named Joy whose mother died in childbirth. Mira, Joy and their father had a complicated connection: The fierce love...
Getting this collection of short stories off to an appropriate start, the first story features “the typing lady,” someone the narrator observes typing in the library. The typing lady is described as “nondescript: oldish, in her fifties or sixties, Asian-looking, with black-framed glasses and gray-streaked hair,” so you know right away the narrator is describing the author...
After Ann Patchett spoke about a 2009 book of short stories by this author, I found this recent one. If you are hoping to read an uplifting book with lovable characters, you should read the title of the book more carefully than I did. The author is a Pakistani-American; he was born in the US, lived in Pakistan until he was thirteen, returned to the US for education and became a lawyer. He now...
It was a review in the NYT of a recent book by this author that took me to this one. I hadn’t heard of this author before and know little about her, but I did read that her mother is Korean and that her French father left Korea before she was born. This book is a novella set in South Korea very near the border with North Korea in a beach town that is almost empty in the winter. The unnamed...
In 1994 when she was seven years old, the author arrived in this country with her mother to join her father who had arrived two years earlier. They knew no English and their visitor visas would soon expire. This book describes the horror of the five years they spent in New York City, barely surviving until her mother took the initiative to get them to Canada where they could receive the support...
This was the perfect book for me to read at this time. I noticed it when it came out in 2024 and was a “best book” in The Washington Post that year. It tells the gripping story of Lila, a 29-year-old book editor living in Brooklyn. She had lived with her divorced mother in Kolkata until she was 16 when her father came from the US and took her there to live. She loved her life as an...
George Saunders is a brilliant writer. Lincoln in the Bardo and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are wildly different from each other but both are tours de force. This new novel is a tough one and my expectations were lowered by Dwight Garner’s take in the NYT. Saunders very effectively used Bardo dwellers, those who have died, but are not settled into their final rest in Lincoln in the Bardo...
Another book by the amazing James McBride (my fourth). I had intended to choose a more light-hearted book, but I found myself reading a war story with lots of death and betrayal. But it was a James McBride book, so it had kindness and yes, a miracle too. His Acknowledgements tell us that when he was nine McBride heard stories from his stepfather and his brothers about their times during World War...