CategoryOther Reviews

I came to this book by way of a tweet someone posted asking for poetic, beautiful slim novels. Those lists are a treat and I plan to go back to this one for more suggestions. I confess I am certain I failed to catch the nuances of what the author wanted to tell us about these characters. Nevertheless, it was a lovely and fun trip. The book opens with the news that Nellie left Frank, taking their...

I have read books written in the voice of teenage boys (with lots of beer involved), but I don’t recall one in the voice of a 10-year old boy. This is set in late 1960s Ireland in a working class neighborhood that is being built up with new housing which means there are drain pipes to crawl through, and that fields available for soccer that are getting smaller. The author won the Booker...

Dorothy mentioned this book of short stories written by her daughter’s fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I find it difficult to write about short stories to balance what I want to remember and what will reflect the collection. The characters are Chinese people in a variety of geographic locations—from Houston to Xi’an, to New York. Some have lived in the U.S. for...

I was loaned this book by Will who said there are references to Buddhism in it. I have since learned that Quan Barry is a poet and novelist and teaches at the University of Wisconsin. She was born in Vietnam and grew up in the US. Set in Mongolia in the present, the story is told by Chuluun, a young Buddhist monk who, with his twin brother Mun, entered the monastery when they were eight years old...

It was Dorothy’s mention of this book that drew me to it. The characters are familiar:  Hera tells the story of the struggles Penelope had while Odysseus was making his 10-year-long trek back from the Trojan War. As if holding off the suitors who wanted to occupy his throne weren’t enough, Penelope had to cope with Elektra and Orestes showing up looking for their mother Clytemnestra...

I don’t remember where I read about this novella, but it filled the goal set for this New Directions series:  “the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” Well, perhaps not “great” and for me it’s one that “could” be read in an afternoon. The seventeen-year old Marguerite schools us in what she learned from her Maman...

It was Ron Charles’ writing about Zadie Smith’s play based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales that moved me to read this. It was bold of me to take this on; I have a high school level memory of The Canterbury Tales (It’s not in modern English, it was written by Chaucer, it’s racy). But I love Zadie Smith and that turns out to be reason...

I knew this book was about an unnamed narrator who agreed to be with a friend who had come to the end of an unsuccessful cancer treatment and had pills to end her life. So I was prepared for a difficult book, but the first chapter that describes a talk the narrator heard by a professor that let me know that was not the hard part of the book for me. His message was about climate change and after...

Having read Anne Youngson’s book Meet Me at the Museum, I looked to this one for a kindly, gently-told tale. And it filled that bill admirably. As in the case with the Museum book, the characters are mature (not elderly) adults who make a change in their lives or have an unexpected change come their way. In this case a 50-something woman who has worked successfully in the corporate world...

I hesitated to read this, wondering if it would be too grim. Now I am grateful to have overcome that worry as it was so full of life, so complex, and so unexpected in many ways. It is set in Northern Ireland just outside Belfast in 1975, during the Troubles. This is the story of Cushla, who is Catholic and teaches in a school with both Catholic and Protestant children. Her brother runs the family...