This was like rifling through a box of Polaroids of a young woman growing into an artist.  The collection of short stories feels of a whole piece, telling stories of Eastern Europe and of moral dilemmas.  There are no easy choices and there are no easy consequences in any of the works.  Makkai has had four stories selected for the various editions of the Best American Non-Required Reading, and it’s easy to see why.  While these are melancholy and beautiful, there’s a wry sense of […]

I guess I just liked her earlier stuff.  The concept and conceit of this book is ridiculous.  A television writer tries to save her marriage by talking into a magic telephone that allows her to communicate with her husband in the past.  Only, none of that matters, because she can’t change the past.  If every time she talked on the phone, she changed something or made things worse and had to fix it, that would be an amazing novel.  If I had the power, I’d […]

As a way huger Harry Potter fan that I even considered, and as someone who sat through the Twilight Fan Fiction panel one SDCC ago — before E.L. James boringed up sex — it was interesting to see Rowell tackle fan-fic.  This time through, her characters were less interesting for me.  I just didn’t give a damn if Cath fell in love, I didn’t feel that heartache I did for Eleanor & Park, and everything felt forced quirky.  However, I’m curious, because Rowell’s latest release […]

While I really dug the John Cleaver trilogy, I was kind of stunned to discover that Wells decided to do another book.  There was plenty story left to tell, but it went from a stark, haunting coming-of-age serial killer story to a weirdly Dexterous procedural.  It’s not bad, but it didn’t kick my ass like the first three books.   But it’s not becoming the goddamn papertowel man, up yours like the Dexter finale.

My fiancee mocks me for being “emo” because I like wistful love songs about desperately falling in love or pining for someone who is imperfect to everyone else while being your everything.  My iPod sings with the nerdish lovesongs of melancholy sadbastards.  So Eleanor & Park is my everything.  It’s so heartbreakingly, soul-crushingly well constructed.  Everything that could even possibly be a huge cliche gets dodged like landmines, but the shrapnel of the truth is still embedded deep and painfully in every character.  It’s a […]

So many folks sing the praises of Rainbow Rowell, I had to add her to the read list.  This is her first novel, that could only work on paper.  But work it does.  Rowell captures that sort of wistful adolescence of the arrestedly developed.  A lonely dude falls in love with a woman as he reads her email exchanges which are in violation of company policy.  But from there Rowell peoples her world with such interesting and layered characters.  The ending was kind of a […]