Oates takes on a huge task in this novel, attempting not only to penetrate the ever-present veil of race relations in American society, but also the heady politics of the Vietnam War era, through the characters of two emotionally skewed young women, one black and one white. We are told at the very beginning that this tale is written by 33-year-old Genna Meade (the white girl) as an “untitled text” about an incident that had happened 15 years earlier. Genna grew up in the 60s […]
Abusive Husbands and Murder
Haven’t read a Patterson thriller in a long time, but picked this 1996 book up for free and gave it a whirl. Pretty scary actually, with multiple villains. Maggie is sitting in jail writing her tragic story and awaiting trial for the murder of her husband. Oh wait, for the second murder of her second husband! The story starts out really creepy, with her and her baby daughter hiding under the porch while her insane alcoholic abuser husband with a gun searches for her. He […]
Family secrets and mid-life crisis
This book, by the author of Sarah’s Key, also takes place in Paris and also has two time lines—the present and the past—but that’s where the similiarities between the two books end. A Secret Kept is the story of a shattered French family, told from the standpoint of the adult son Antoine, who is going through a mid-life crisis, looking back at his past and trying to make sense of it. He is an apparently successful architect who has lost his creative thirst; he has […]
A story of family dysfunction and the impact of loss
A painful story of a dysfunctional family plagued by mental illness, Housekeeping is nonetheless beautifully written and highly evocative. Two young sisters Ruth and Lucille are left alone when their unmoored mother dumps them at their grandmother’s house at a tender age, and then proceeds to drive herself off a cliff and into a lake, the same lake that her own father—a dreamy, frustrated, and regret-filled man–had died in following a train wreck years earlier. Their aged Nona is a loving and gentle caregiver, but […]
The Jewish immigrant experience in a delightful memoir
Although dubbed a novel, Up From Orchard Street is a memoir in the same way Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was—honest, poignant, often painful, but filled with the sights, smells and sounds of the immigrant experience. Widmer’s story takes place in New York’s Lower East Side in the ‘30s, where many Eastern European Jews had settled in search of a new and hopefully better future in the U.S. Manya Roth, aka Bubby, is the indulgent mother of flashy womanizing smart-alecky Jack, her only child from a […]
Baldacci gets it right with The Whole Truth
After the last few years’ relative duds by Baldacci, I picked up The Whole Truth at a yard sale and reminded myself that my once favorite author definitely has what it takes, but needs to get over his own popularity and his publisher’s pressures to churn out the moneymakers, and go back to writing good books. This 2008 novel about a neo-Cold War cooked up by a psychotic arms dealer and a “perception management” firm had shivers running down my spine. I won’t say this […]
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