I’ve had this memoir on my to-read shelf for far too long; I think someone gave it to me or I picked it up at a book sale. Still, I remember Darin Strauss telling a version of this story on This American Life a while ago—how one day near the end of his senior year of high school, he was driving some of his friends to play mini-golf and he struck and killed a girl on a bicycle. Darin knew this girl, Celine Zilke, because […]
Like a Car Wreck or a Couple Fighting
I don’t know how I feel about this novel. On the one hand, there’s no question that Lauren Groff can write and I kind of like the way the narrator of this novel slips into the heads of the characters but then pulls out [often in brackets] to comment on the story from a more omniscient vantage point. As a reader, you’re pulled in and then shoved out and then pulled in again [yes, I know how that sounds.] This is both the story of […]
Insider Trading, Maths Competitions, and One Big Hairy Dog
I read Me Before You for CBR7 and enjoyed it, so I thought I’d start 2016 with another Jojo Moyes novel, One Plus One. Moyes is good at throwing you into a story and making you care about her characters—even if you suspect you know how it will all turn out. As in Me Before You, the novel is set in England and there is a class difference between the main characters–Jess Thomas, a single mom of two, actually cleans the beach house of Ed […]
Not With a Bang but a Whimper
That noise is the sound of me yawning through this latest Jack Reacher adventure by Lee Child. A few novels ago I almost stopped reading Child—really turned off by the feel of revenge porn, pure and simple, where violence and bloodshed seem to roll off Reacher like I don’t know, water off a duck’s back, or blood off of a serial killer’s plastic rain gear. Personally, I like my heroes and anti-heroes just a tad melancholy and tortured by the choices they make, and the […]
Next Stop?
The blurb on the cover of this novel compares it to Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, and that’s what drew me to it as well as the basic concept—an indie musician is trying to jumpstart her career after a second album slump. Anna Brundage is said musician, who I picture as looking something like Neko Case but who is not nearly as endearingly goofy or as attached to animals as Case is. Anna is the daughter of a famous conceptual artist, who created giant art […]
A Fight Far From Fair
If you’re a fan of Sarah Waters or Emma Donoghue (doing historical fiction), then I think you’ll like this novel—a story partly centered around Ruth, a woman boxer in Bristol in the 19th century but also following several other characters she comes in contact with—George, a gentleman with poor prospects and a penchant for gambling, and Charlotte, a wealthy young woman scarred by small pox and trapped by the men in her life. All three characters are struggling to make their way in the world—trapped […]
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