Miranda is a sixth-grader, living in New York City. Her best friend is a neighbor boy named Sal, and they spend almost all their time together. When the book opens, Miranda and Sal are starting to part ways for reasons that she doesn’t fully understand. Her mother is auditioning for a game show, and there’s a crazy homeless guy on her corner that scares her. Suddenly she starts getting anonymous notes from someone who seems to know things about her that shouldn’t be possible. This […]
You are entering the Red Zone. Proceed at own risk. When in doubt, run.
I consider myself very lucky that I discovered Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” series only last summer, so the wait for City of Mirrors was much less painful and dramatic than it would have been if I’d been reading in real time: The Passage was published in 2010 and The Twelve in 2012. City of Mirrors came out four weeks ago. That’s not on a George R. R. Martin level, but still could have been a brutal wait for me. Whew! I love this series. I […]
The Gods of Gotham
Lindsay Faye’s extraordinary The Gods of Gotham is the best novel of its kind since Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. This isn’t a unique observation, it’s emblazoned across the cover of the novel. However I agree with it. I love big city historical fiction so taking a serial killer thriller and setting it in New York City in 1845 is always going to draw my interest. Faye goes a step further by making the origin of the New York City Police Department, and beginning of the […]
Gotta dance!
I was immediately intrigued by Melina’s review of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. It looked like the kind of story that hit all my soft spots: Manhattan, fairy tales, Jazz Age, and, perhaps most importantly, ladies who shut down the dance floor. I cannot help myself with the dance stories. I love them all, from the cheesiest Step It Up #39 or whatever to the most discretely dramatic conversation during an Austen Regency dance, I will drink them all up. And I wasn’t disappointed! This is a […]
NYC in the eyes of magical creatures
This book has been favorably reviewed by many, including Cannonballer Jen K, so I bought it on my recent trip to Bangkok, where they have an expansive Kinokuniya. I was intrigued by the idea of a golem — have always been intrigued by them since it was first mentioned in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay as a character in a graphic novel by the protagonist Josef Kavalier — but this was the first time I’ve thought of them as a Jewish equivalent to a djinni, […]
Are We All Defined by Our Inner 15-year-old?
Meg Wolitzer’s novel spans many decades—telling the story of a group of friends who meet at an “arty” summer camp in upstate New York in the early seventies but whose lives remain entangled with each other’s into the new millennium. Most of the novel is told from the perspective of Jules Jacobson, who comes to the camp as Julie but after getting invited into a circle of already established friends, turns into Jules and embraces a life in the arts. The group consists of the […]
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