But this too is true: stories can save us. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all dead. But in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return […]
A Beach Read in January
This novel by Liane Moriarty was a good way to start 2017 and was my second foray into an interestingly structured Moriarty tale. In Big Little Lies, the first novel of hers I read, the story circles around a death, the details which are not revealed until almost the end. Similarly, the events of Truly Madly Guilty swirl around something catastrophic that happens at an afternoon barbeque, but what that event involves exactly takes most of the story to get to. However, in both cases, […]
May There Be No Frost on Your Potatoes
Though it took me a couple of chapters to get into this latest by Emma Donoghue, staying with it paid off. It’s sometime after the Crimean War and a British nurse, Lib Wright, is sent to a remote village in Ireland. Lib was trained in the “new” nursing methods by Florence Nightingale and she has been hired by a committee of locals to help verify (or disprove) that a miracle is taking place. A young eleven-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell, stopped eating four months before and […]
A Melody to Our Madness
If we had jazz, would we have survived differently? If we had known our story was a blues story with a refrain running through it, would we have lifted our heads, said to each other, This is memory again and again until the living made sense? Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness (1-2)? If a novel and a poem had a child, it would be this book—brief, beautiful, and biting–both sad and celebratory. I read […]
One Sees Clearly Only with the Heart
Right after finishing and loving The Sun is Also a Star, I ran out to the library and got Nicola Yoon’s first novel, Everything, Everything. Though I didn’t love it quite as much as her second book, I thought it was engaging, moving, and well-constructed. I also can see Yoon starting to think through some minor themes that become major themes in The Sun is Also a Star. This novel is a love story, but it’s not your typical teen romance. Madeline Whittier, who is […]
Petitio Principii (or “The Circular Argument”)
I have mixed feelings about this novel but I blame it on the election. So, I picked up The Nix from my college’s library (No fines for faculty for overdue books! No fines! No fines!) back in late October after reading a couple of reviews and hearing the author on NPR (I can’t remember which program). It seemed like it could be a sprawling, intriguing mess, in the vein of The Goldfinch, which I enjoyed. However, it took me over a month to finish this, […]
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