BookBrowse Editorial Review
Idaho: A Novel
by Emily Ruskovich
(3/8/2017)
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed to find the second half didn't live up to my admittedly high expectations. The strength of the writing is diluted among all the characters, and the emotional arc meanders at a major plot point in Ann's search. Ultimately, the redemptive bow that ties up the end is rushed and emotionally incomplete, even if it feels right. I can't help but admit how sad I was that it wasn't the novel I wanted it to be. But I'll forever be grateful for the gift of the p
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
(3/14/2012)
The essence of Winterson's own tenuous life-story is mimicked in the structure of her memoir, a jumble of hazy pieces coalescing into a mind, a self. What felt unformed and gangly in the first half becomes svelt and athletic; what was meandering becomes as sure and steady as a freight train.... Winterson offers a reader much more than the satisfaction of voyeuristic curiosity that marks so many train-wreck memoirs; this is a memoir about how we deal with our lot in life. Not how we can endure it
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Snow Child: A Novel
by Eowyn Ivey
(2/15/2012)
My experience of reading this novel was extremely personal. It touched me deeply in a way that I'm not sure it would have had I not identified so closely with its emotional core. So I feel affection for The Snow Child that belies my disappointment in the novel as a whole. Eowyn Ivey's writing is enchanting, a pure pleasure to read. She fleshes out the landscape with striking and sensuous detail, saddles her characters with palpable pain and then blesses them with fleeting moments of conta
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, Maira Kalman (Illustrator)
(1/11/2012)
I loved this book. If I'd read this book when I was 14, I would have written that with capital letters and exclamation points, the page soggy with tears. Remember when you could read a book and feel like it was written just for you?... The qualities that make it so hard to be a teenager are also the reasons why they are such ripe receptors for fiction; they're gravely serious, they understand true drama, and they experience emotions with crushing severity. If you start reading Why We Broke Up
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It: Stories
(7/8/2010)
Even if I wasn't already a fan of Maile Meloy's writing, I would have read
Both Ways
Is the Only Way I Want It for the title alone. In the collection's
penultimate story, a conflicted husband reflects on a poem by
A.R. Ammons (One
can't/have it/both ways/and both/ways is/the only/way I/want it). He lies
curled up with his wife of three decades, comforted by her intelligence and
aging beauty, while he contemplates leaving her for the recently-teenaged girl
who taught
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
by Kay Ryan
(4/7/2010)
Despite her lofty government-issued title, Ryan lays her poet's cards right out on the table, in short, sly poems that wear their obsessions boldly and yield their secrets willingly. She leads you playfully to the end the diving board with rhyming words and paired sounds, delicious nouns and rich words, sing-songy cadence and consonance; you don't realize she's tied a block of cement to your foot til you're already over the edge... Readers looking for soothing meditations on beauty or nature to
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
(12/9/2009)
The stories in
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth grab you from the
first line (It took me damn near a week to convince Sue-Bee to come watch
this guy shoot himself in the face) and surprise you with shocks of
tenderness mingled with absurdity. Many of these stories involve some little
tweak of reality that makes them loveable, funny, and engaging, illuminating
their often sad underpinnings. The opening story, "Grand Stand-In," is narrated
by an older woman with no
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
(10/21/2009)
It's hard to fight the urge to scrawl "love love love" in red crayon across the page, or to make a beribboned valentine full of sappy verse in lieu of actually reviewing Lorrie Moore's new book. She tops all my lists (top 10 books, top 5 writers, books you'd take to a deserted island), and my copies of her novels and short stories are filled with bookmarked passages, lovingly read over and over again. Is A Gate at the Stairs her best work? No. But it may be the one that finally brings her
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
by Margaret Drabble
(10/7/2009)
To read The Pattern in the Carpet is to witness the wide-ranging power of a keen and curious mind. By her own admission "not a tidy writer," Margaret Drabble's "personal history with jigsaws" is a memoir for readers who are willing to stray from the path and possibly never return. It's about jigsaws, certainly, but also about history, philosophy, cartography, literature, poetry, obsession, depression, and the delight of the digression. If you like your timelines linear, your themes clearl
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Say You're One of Them
(9/23/2009)
I got stumped last year trying to review this book. On the heels of the Oprah's
announcement that Say You're One of Them would be her next book club
pick, I looked back on my abandoned draft. I see two paragraphs with an "x"
marked through them, and written at the bottom: I'm afraid I don't have the
right adjectives to review this book.
Unspeakable things happen to children in these stories, awful things we know are
happening to actual children in the real worl
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories
by Wells Tower
(4/1/2009)
Although Tower writes with the specificity and razor-sharp observations of a poet, his metaphors go down easy, coated in the sugar of a writer at ease with his craft... Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned makes me hunger for Tower's first novel.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
(2/5/2009)
As a bookseller, I live for novels like Cutting for Stone - big, fat,
beautiful novels as beguiling and enchanting as babies, as wise and as generous
as old sages. They are the bread-and-butter novels I can't wait to sell, the
books people talk about all year long, the books they buy for their sisters and
fathers, the book they press into the hands of friends with insistent, almost
violent exhortations. Read this. You will love it. You HAVE to read this
book.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sea of Poppies: A Novel
by Amitav Ghosh
(1/7/2009)
As the language departs from the concrete vocabulary of vessels and their parts, meaning breaks down, but the speakers forge ahead into delightful misunderstandings with unwittingly bawdy undertones. There is a glossary of sorts at the back, but after a few exchanges, you get the gist – which is just about what the characters themselves get as they attempt to bridge linguistic impasses. Struggling to decode the strange patois, then slipping into its lilts and rhythms, illuminates how malleable l
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
(11/12/2008)
I lost a night of sleep and a day of work to this book. Usually drawn to decidedly toothier fare, I was ready for a little treat. I was not prepared for an all-encompassing vortex of storytelling that would render all of my other responsibilities utterly unimportant. Both a gripping adventure tale and a moving portrait of a tempestuous, beautifully flawed young woman coming of age, Graceling marks the debut of a truly gifted writer.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel
by Kathleen Kent
(10/15/2008)
The events of 1692 are well-trod ground even for those who slept through history class. Grisly, sensational, and safely far away in time, the Salem witch trials are easily one of the most popular topics for school reports. Like many events sketched repeatedly in thumbnail fashion, the witch trials have become a caricature, a short-hand reference for fanaticism and the darker passages of America's colonial history. So it speaks to the strength of Kathleen Kent's writing that each page of The H
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Good Thief: A Novel
by Hannah Tinti
(9/4/2008)
Scarcely thirty pages in, I realized what I suspected was true: this is the book that everyone will love this summer. Not just you, but your teenage daughter, your 12-year-old grandson, your mother or grandmother... it's hard to think of someone that won't be taken with this lovely little book.
An adventure tale with a good dose of Gothic finery, The Good Thief is
refreshingly old-fashioned, wonderfully strange, and darkly funny. It's suspenseful and grim, but you can still rea
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel
by Rivka Galchen
(7/11/2008)
Galchen is both playful and serious, and has an impressive instinct for how far she can push the boundaries and how much she can ask of her readers. She constructs beautiful sentences, and uncovers humor inherent in language, reveling in mis-hearings, botched translations, and the allure and poetry of scientific writing just outside the layperson's ken. She makes a completely preposterous premise come alive with equal parts fun and heartache, and is generous with her myriad gifts to the very end
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Beijing Coma: A Novel
by Ma Jian
(7/11/2008)
How can a novel about the massacre of hundreds of people narrated by a man in a coma be beautiful, even life-affirming? Let me not mislead you; this is a painful novel, filled with brutality and horror. It would be impossible to read, were it not for the protagonist's voice, filled with the light of vivid memories and the sweet ache of youth. Beijing Coma is 600 pages of fiction based on facts too awful to bear, but the way Ma Jian tells the story makes the novel hard to put down, even wh
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Story of a Marriage: A Novel
by Andrew Sean Greer
(6/1/2008)
With prose so fine it demands slow savoring, and a plot so intriguing it demands breathless page-turning, The Story of a Marriage also serves as a gorgeous meditation on romantic partnership, the great mystery of knowing another, and what knowing someone really means. It's a novel that invites open-ended pondering, reconstructed theories, a-ha!-moments, and meaty discussions. Just when you think you've figured it out, out pops another brilliant star or passing cloud to alter the constella
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine
(5/2/2008)
The Hakawati, like any good novel, isn't for everyone. Reading it takes a little practice, a little pacing, and if you're really lucky, one empty weekend to devour it whole. My advice to potential readers is this: Surrender to this hakawati. Get on his magic carpet, and let him tell you a story. In fact, let him tell you one thousand stories. He'll handle all the details, and you can sit back and enjoy the ride.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
(4/3/2008)
Lush Life reads like a giant, sprawling episode of
your favorite fast-talking police procedural, with type breaks and metaphors
standing in for jump cuts and sweeping crane-mounted pans across the city
skyline. Much more in line with The Wire (for which Richard Price wrote
several episodes) than Law and Order, Price is obviously concerned with
deeper ideas about the nature of the city, gentrification, and the
intersections of race and class, and Lush Lif
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Resistance by Owen Sheers
(3/6/2008)
Powered by a giant "what if?" Resistance is an unexpectedly suspenseful meditation on the ways the schisms of war can break down when reduced to the human element, isolated from the larger machine. With finely detailed prose and compassionate narration, Owen Sheers shapes an unusual war novel, almost completely removed from violence and political struggles, yet no less terrifying.
At times, Resistance seems like it was once a much longer novel. A few tangents feel irrel
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
(3/6/2008)
I hungrily raced through Mudbound in just two days, a whirlwind, fiction-filled 48 hours in which I loathed to put the book down. In the non-reading hours I worked or drifted to sleep with Hillary Jordan's six narrating characters chattering on gently in my head. Alternating narrators is tricky business, but Jordan pulls it off seamlessly, immediately commanding her characters to life .....
Her storytellers bear witness to some of the most horrific, unjust beliefs and actions that stain our nat
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy
(3/6/2008)
Cate Kennedy's writing is sharp; her details are meaningful but not meandering, her dialogue spot-on and funny but also totally believable, the plot lines dramatic, but so well crafted that your trust never wavers ..... Think of the rush you get from racing to the end of an up-all-night novel – except there are seventeen of these, each less than ten pages long. If you're pressed for time, you can't really do better than one of these before bed. And if you're not, then you've got a great weekend
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
(2/21/2008)
I found Song Yet Sung such a good, old-fashioned read - dramatic plot,
broad characters, redemptive themes - that I wanted it to be perfect.
Unfortunately, it suffers from a few facile conclusions and implausible
resolutions, and the central dream motif becomes heavy-handed as the novel
progresses. Still, so engaging are its many merits that choosing to forgive its
minor flaws offers the possibility of an up-all-night read that runs much deeper
than the usual fare.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
(2/7/2008)
An unexpectedly graceful mix of ideas about ghosts, childhood, sexuality, gender, family, death, and the many ways one can be haunted.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
by Jeffrey Eugenides
(2/7/2008)
With his artful curating, Eugenides has conquered one of the biggest problems of the short story collection. Reading anthologies can often be a dust-collecting, bedside-lingering process. Usually grouped by time period, nationality, publication, or award, they often serve primarily as a reference, introduction, or catalog, and editors are careful to make their personalities invisible. This makes them useful, reliable, and enjoyable for their parts, but unremarkable as a whole. My Mistress's Spar
BookBrowse Editorial Review
In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating
by Michael Pollan
(1/24/2008)
Rather than presenting a faddish list of do's and don'ts that might change next year, Pollan presents a concept of food and eating that shakes out as remarkably sound and sustainable – not just for ourselves, but also for our environment and fellow man. With a small but impassioned return to whole foods, free-range meats, and fair, local farming brewing among foodies, Pollan will inevitably preach to the choir, but some of his research is sure to get even the most thoughtful eaters scratching th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
What I Was: A Novel
by Meg Rosoff
(1/24/2008)
The treat of the book is Rosoff’s beautiful and mythically charged setting. Her lush prose paints the craggy rocks and crashing sea surrounding Finn’s fairy-tale-like shack and the bone-aching chill of the damp winds with unforgettable detail. However, her stellar prose makes the book all the more disappointing, as it sets the reader up to expect greatness through-and-through. While the three star rating indicates "average", Rosoff's talents are anything but, so if you're a newcomer, start with
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Cheating at Canasta: Stories
by William Trevor
(11/27/2007)
Many book clubs are hesitant to discuss short story collections, and understandably so – it can be difficult to know where to start with so many plotlines, characters and competing ideas; but choosing just two or three stories from a collection to discuss makes for great conversation – and Cheating at Canasta would be a great place to start. The plots and characters raise complex, relevant, and immediately discussable issues, and Trevor's style is wonderfully readable. Short stories are a
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Lost Paradise: A Novel
by Cees Nooteboom
(11/8/2007)
No doubt this novel will be divisive, declared alternately a masterpiece, masterful, and a real "piece of work" by critics and readers of all stripes. Some of us don't like to work quite so hard to get to the bottom of things, while others find greatest pleasure in the challenge. Still others won't care about dissecting and distilling, choosing instead to read this slip of a novel for its dreamy, grainy-film-like qualities, suspended in time and just outside of the concrete world.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Free Life: A Novel
by Ha Jin
(11/8/2007)
Readers will fall into separate camps over A Free Life. Something about Jin's detached, yet obsessively attentive prose is ultimately readable, and produces a style that some will read as refreshingly spare and realist, while others find stunted and astoundingly boring. The bottom line: If you've never read anything by Ha Jin, definitely read Waiting first. If you're one of many who read Waiting and loved it, then try out A Free Life. Already attuned to his stripped p
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Novel
by Junot Diaz
(10/4/2007)
As we flip back and forth, character to character, narrator to narrator, Diaz's prose-dance continues to dazzle as the story takes on greater weight as the history piles on – but it's not just dazzling for the sake of the dazzle. He loves the performance, but not for the applause. He loves doing it, loves the writing, loves the rush and the game, and most of all the promise, the hope, the bet, that you, the reader, will fall in love, too.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
by Diane Ackerman
(10/4/2007)
So many stories have been written about the Holocaust. Some recount one of the few small miracles, they give us hope for humanity, and honor those who acted with compassion. Others delve into the darkest parts of the destruction, sinking the reader deep into the trenches of the violence. But The Zookeeper's Wife does both, which is what makes it so worth reading. Writing unflinchingly with equal vigor about the beauty and the ugliness, Diane Ackerman manages to re-sensitize the reader to
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson
(9/20/2007)
Does it sound relentless? At moments, this giant novel is exactly that; and certainly, it's supposed to be. But the catch is that Johnson's often unwieldy, rant-filled dialogue and frenetic plotline is checkered with great, poetic moments of clarity as his characters search for simple grace. The chugging train of his story stops every so often at the tug of a heartstring or simply because of the way the light is falling, and a great feeling of relief washes the whole grimy thing clean. Then the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Away: A Novel
by Amy Bloom
(9/20/2007)
On a purely formal level, Away is stunning, and succeeds as a gleaming showcase for Amy Bloom's considerable talents. However, what makes Away an up-all-night read is its vitality, the breath that makes it all come alive. It’s a tight story – 235 pages span three years and a cast of characters each worthy of their own novel; but the focus is clear - Bloom’s spotlight pans where it needs to, and then stops on a dime, showing you where to look, deep at the quick of the story, where it pulse