I liked Commonwealth but I think I could have loved it. In the past the Cousins and Keatings are brought together one fateful day at a Christening party when Mr Cousins kisses Mrs Keating. After a few years of secret rendezvouses the Keatings and Cousins officially merge into one big, messy unit. This combined family situation begins to dissolve when one of the six children dies in an accident that is slowly revealed to the reader. “He realized then what he had known from the first minute […]
Space: the Final Frontier
“It’s a planet,” I said. “It’s not what we thought it was back home. It’s not this safe cocoon, man. We’re out here spinning in all this chaos. The Earth is a planet. The Earth is a spaceship, and we’re all space travelers.” My husband was *thisclose* to finishing his BS in Physics and taking his first steps into an Engineering program when NASA began the slow down, and eventual shut down, of its shuttle launches. He never wanted to be an astronaut; he wanted to […]
Jackie’s Girl
This is not a book about the Kennedys; yes, of course, Jackie Kennedy and her children play major roles in the life of Kathy McKeon but the overall story is how a young, Irish immigrant found her place in America at the side of one of the most beloved American families. Kathy was raised in poverty on a farm in Ireland, when she was nineteen her American uncle offered to pay the way for her brother to come to New York but he declined. The […]
“And eventually-though neither of us knew it yet-we’d end up here, in this place, within and without the world of the painting.”
I’d never heard of the painting Christina’s World but it is an otherwise well known work by American artist Andrew Wyeth; Christina Baker Kline uses the painting as a launching point for her novel A Piece of the World which does an excellent job blending the lives of real people into an enjoyable piece of fiction. “Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my […]
“Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”
I have a well documented problem with books that have too many characters, particularly when the too many characters each have chapters from their point of views, so I don’t think I was every going to love Into the Water… That being said, even if the novel only focused on two or three of the characters I still don’t think I would have been into it, definitely not like I was with Hawkins’ previous novel Girl on the Train or any of the other recent strings of female focused […]
But I’m a Cheerleader
This was a choice for last year’s Y.A. Book Club but it lost out to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and, having now read both, I wish Exit, Pursued By a Bear had won. “There’s a moment when I know that I should scream. But screaming would be hard. And blackness would be easy. Black picks me.” Hermione Winters is a popular cheerleader for the small Canadian town of Palermo, where cheerleaders are bigger sport stars than the teams they root for- like in Bring it […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- …
- 101
- Next Page »