When a book has over 18,000 Amazon reviews with a five-star average rating, that is a book I am going to think about reading, especially when it’s on sale for $1.99 on Kindle. Kristin Hannah’s World War II saga about French sisters who fight the war on the homefront in two very different ways is indeed well-written, but it’s adherence to genre conventions and an overly formulaic plot ultimately render it somewhat unworthy of those gaudy reviews. Two sisters who are very different, a dead […]

By the time you’ve finished reading the title of Dave Eggers’s 2014 novel, you’re practically halfway done with the book itself. At 230 pages it is not exactly a back-breaking tome, and since it is written entirely in dialogue, it moves even faster than its brevity would suggest. Unfortunately, the book is light in more ways than one. Despite some clever writing and a few hints at a more meaningful story, Eggers’s title is much more memorable than his story. As for that story, it […]

In the years before WWII, an unlikely collection of artists, industrialists, transvestites, homosexuals, and entertainers find their lives connected through Lou Villars, a cross-dressing lesbian athlete turned nightclub performer turned (eventually) something far worse. Prose’s novel takes the form of a collection of personal narratives, coming together to roughly tell the story of Lou Villars. The photographer Gabor Tsenyi frequently mentions her exploits in letters home to his parents in which he usually asks for more money. His wife Susanne mentions her in her unpublished […]