Thanks to the CBR7 folks whose positive reviews of this book helped put it on my radar when I was in the airport gift store, looking for something to read. Celeste Ng has created a powerful novel (I can’t believe it’s a debut) that captures the complexity of many things—growing up in the Midwest in the 1970’s, being the Other in a variety of situations, and the way parents and children fail to understand each other. The novel begins with the drowning death of Lydia […]
The Past Never Really Stays in the Past
I remember when I first read A Drink Before the War and fell in love with the way Dennis Lehane captured the gritty streets of Boston and the gritty lives of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. However, as the years went by and Lehane started to leave these characters behind to pursue other stories, I became more sporadic in my reading of him. I read Mystic River and Shutter Island but I had missed two other books that deal with the Coughlin family when I […]
A Wicked Mess (or Harlan Coben, I apologize!)
A couple months ago I read the latest Harlan Coben standalone and though I enjoyed it, I felt like Coben was phoning it in and that his suspense novels had started to blur in my head. Then, I read this novel, plucked off the e-shelf at my local library, and I want to issue an apology. I’m not sure I fully appreciated the skill with which Coben constructs his narratives until I read this schlocky mess. I almost stopped halfway through this book, because it […]
Trigger Warnings Abound
Long before I knew the phrase, trigger warning, I experienced it while watching the movie Fearless—a film from the 90’s that features Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez as two strangers who survive a plane crash, a crash that kills Perez’s toddler son. They become friends of a sort as they attempt to cope with the aftermath of the accident and there’s a scene about three quarters of the way through the movie (I think . . . I haven’t watched it since 1994) where they […]
Rome is Where We Saw the Yellow Dog
Sometimes you enjoy a book because it comes at the right time. I recently spent a week in Scotland and so Sara Gruen’s novel, set in a Highland village on the shores of Loch Ness, evoked many vivid memories of incredible scenery and lovely accents. The main character of this story is not Scottish but American. Maddie Hyde is a society wife, who has been dragged to Scotland by her husband, Ellis, in an attempt to regain the family fortune. Accompanying them is Ellis’s best […]
The Danger of Great Expectations
As someone who loved, loved, loved Eleanor and Park and who loved Fangirl, I was surprised to find that I had more mixed feelings about this novel by Rainbow Rowell. There were a lot of things I liked and a lot of potential but there were also some things that didn’t work—some which I noticed while I read and others that began to bug me when I thought about them more afterwards. First of all, a quick overview. Landline is the story of an LA […]
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