BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Love Object: Selected Stories
by Edna O'Brien
(5/13/2015)
Edna O'Brien's The Love Object is more than a short-story collection, it's an encyclopedia of perfect storytelling and a retrospective on the fifty-year career of a writer of exquisite finesse and pathos. O'Brien has taken a great deal of time over these small works of art. They are finely wrought pieces with vivid details, sparingly rendered. The sentences are buffed to a polish, the symbolic images (a green georgette evening gown, a mossy cave, an undercooked fowl) so finely worked, the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips
(4/29/2015)
I can think of no better pleasure than to read The Lost Child and to reread Wuthering Heights right after. Entering into the nitty gritty of the thematic connections Phillips hopes to make – about loss and identity, gender and race, creativity and adversity – is a satisfying, although not undemanding venture. The ghostly presence of Emily Brontë makes The Lost Child more than the sum of its parts, and the resonances Phillips explores between the literary past and the recent
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Plague Land by S. D. Sykes
(3/18/2015)
Part of the pleasure in a historical mystery, of course, comes from the ambience of the time and place, and Oswald is a lyrical observer of the local color of his world, whether he's waxing poetic about the bucolic landscape ("the rain gave way to a fan of sunlight") or the texture of a plague pit ("creaking and bony mattress of death"). Sykes gives us plenty of medieval terminology to enjoy, including litanies of lovely-sounding archaic herbs with aromatic and medical uses. The scenery is richl
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Us: A Novel
by David Nicholls
(1/21/2015)
Us is a pleasurable read with short, comic chapters that also treads on satisfying emotional territory. It's possible to be cynical about reading a book that is expected to be a big commercial juggernaut, or a gateway to something bigger and more lucrative (the film) – but seeing Us through that lens would underestimate a book that is, as it should be, more than a pre-screenplay "treatment." There is emotional truth and subtlety here, in Douglas Petersen's view of the world, that w
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena
(3/5/2014)
Hagena’s lyricism is richly rewarding. Her account, in Iris’s voice, of grandmother Bertha’s sliding into dementia is beautiful and sad, and seems piercingly true-to-life...But the real core of the book is its sensuality, the unexpected tastes and sights and sounds that it evokes, like the surprising taste of marzipan in the seeds of a Boskoop apple.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell
(1/8/2014)
The Twistrose Key has the flavor, at times, of a child's dream, recounted over the breakfast table. The inventiveness is breathtaking, but threatens to get carried away. The concept of a world of Petlings is sure to appeal, and Tone Almhjell's ornate vision of that world will leave children with many sparkling images to take into their own dreams.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Into That Forest by Louis Nowra
(10/16/2013)
Into That Forest raises questions about loss in all its forms, from personal grief to the extinction of a species. But the novel also gives us an incredible chance to "crawl" into the burrow of a Tasmanian tiger, which opens the mind to the magnificence of animals in general.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success
by Adam M. Grant Ph.D.
(7/24/2013)
Give and Take has useful information for everyone, not just venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I found myself hoping that corporations around the world are sitting down with Grant's book and engaging in his paradigm shift. His is a vision that deserves elaboration and an even broader impact.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Flora by Gail Godwin
(6/5/2013)
A layering of perspective is one of the most interesting aspects of Flora. On the book jacket, novelist John Irving aptly likens Godwin's achievement to the pared-down psychological stories of Alice Munro. There are shades of the familiar in Flora, themes a reader is likely to have seen before – say, in Ian McEwan's Atonement. Familiarity isn't necessarily a bad thing, and Flora makes for a pleasurable, comfortable read.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner
(3/20/2013)
The political circumstances that gave rise to the classic dystopian novels of the twentieth century are in no way gone from the world. Today's young people have to make sense of grim facts about torture and totalitarianism in the news, so it makes sense to give them books in which to work through these
moral dilemmas. Still, Maggot Moon won't be right for every kid, even those who fall into the suggested range of age 12 and up. The kids who do read this will benefit from some serious fol
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
by Jared Diamond
(1/23/2013)
[Jared] Diamond paints with a very broad brush, which means that while the scope of his work is exciting, the complexity of the details can be lost. The gaps left by the broad-brush approach grow frustrating. Diamond doesn't engage in the history of his question ('What can we learn from traditional societies?'), for one thing. He isn't interested in meta-debate, but the lack of a recent historical perspective reads like a glaring omission.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves)
(8/22/2012)
Hughes takes on the complex task of attempting to square the development of human culture with what we know about the principles of evolution and natural selection at work in the biological world. He isn't working alone - in fact, his project is more of a translation, of laying out the work of other scientists and thinkers in an engaging, instructive narrative form for the lay-reader. Images and anecdotes make his logic vivid in the mind... He is a good storyteller, crisp and funny, and alway
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Undertow: A Novel
by Jo Baker
(6/28/2012)
The Undertow deserves to be taken seriously. Stylistically, it's a book with a serious flavor... The shining dreams of youth never come easily to fruition, and hope and beauty reveal themselves in flashes. It takes more than one generation to fulfill an ambition, and when luxury and plenty come to the family (enough to eat at every meal, a big house to live in), the younger generation takes the gains for granted. For all its watercolor lightness, The Undertow has a very sober take
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle
(5/2/2012)
A sensitive, thoughtful middle-grade or young teenaged girl would be the perfect reader for this book, and her mom would enjoy making an afternoon of it too. Doyle's writing reminds me that kids do not need lurid fantasy to draw them in to literature; they are thinking about big, real-life issues just as adults are. A Greyhound of a Girl will give kids a beautiful sense of possibility as they ponder their place in history and the passage of time.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Great Northern Express: A Writer's Journey Home
by Howard Frank Mosher
(4/4/2012)
Mosher's voice is ebullient. His sense of humor plays lightly on themes of literature, mortality, and nostalgia, as if he were composing jazz riffs on an old banjo. Carl Hiaasen is quoted on the book jacket, comparing Mosher to Mark Twain - and the comparison is apt. It's a pleasure to be traveling in the company of his well-trained eye, always on the look-out for absurd conjunctions of American life. Like Twain, he locates poetry in the realm of the everyday - in the roadways and hotels and reg
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Technologists: A Novel
by Matthew Pearl
(3/7/2012)
The Technologists has me reaching for nineteenth-century circus poster adjectives: stupendous, extraordinary, death-defying! ...The moral heart of the novel is very endearing - Pearl gives us an insight into the nineteenth century that is affectionate and indebted. His heroes are honorable and humane and long-seeing. Readers can enjoy the book as an amusing, suspenseful romp and come away with some understanding about how we got to where we are, technologically and morally speaking.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Quality of Mercy: A Novel
by Barry Unsworth
(2/1/2012)
Another thing Unsworth does brilliantly is create a historical backdrop that is utterly believable without being intrusive. Small descriptive vignettes in the background drive home the fact that this is a vastly different world from our own. There are the expected wigs and carriages and tasteful interiors, and then there are the "usual array of traitors' heads" on spikes, and the "spyglasses for rent to any passersby who might be taken with a fancy for a closer look at the features of the deca
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
(11/17/2011)
In the opening section of The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst jumps into the milieu of some of the greatest novels in English, the end of the dress-for-dinner era that came just before World War I. His fine and elegant writing seems to be more than an homage to novels such as Brideshead Revisited or Howard's End; the precision of his language allows Hollinghurst to tease out what his characters are actually thinking even as what comes out of their mouths is the proper, d
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel
by Paul La Farge
(10/19/2011)
La Farge has done a masterful job creating a world that is at once emotionally real and self-consciously literary on every page. The prose is sharp and beautiful, and the characters are so engaging they may lull the reader into thinking of Luminous Airplanes as a conventional novel. It isn't... [But it] is as delicately constructed as a lyric poem - every detail is carefully connected by the finest of threads. The story is funny and loving and imaginative, and at every turn there is evide
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Butterfly Cabinet: A Novel
by Bernie McGill
(9/21/2011)
I know there are many readers like me out there who will gobble up any story about a stately Victorian household with plenty of upstairs/downstairs class tension. I've tasted books like The Butterfly Cabinet before, and I still find them as alluring as toast and tea - good enough to be a regular part of the diet.... There are intriguing characters on both sides of the divide in Bernie McGill's Oranmore house, and the story provides readers the Victoriana they crave; there is social conser
BookBrowse Editorial Review
No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene
(6/15/2011)
Greene gives the best description I've ever read about what international adoption feels like from the inside, about the agonies of making the decision and choosing a child, and about the ambiguities involved in taking a child out of grim circumstances in the third world and trying to integrate him into an American family by means of Legos and water balloons.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Pym: A Novel
by Mat Johnson
(4/6/2011)
Imagine the conversation around the table at Random House when Mat Johnson's agent pitched Pym:
"This book is Eddie Murphy does The X-Files."
"No, it's Philip K. Dick with a touch of The Corrections."
"Wait, I thought it was post-colonial Gothic stuff - Edgar Allan Poe meets Urkel from that old TV show..."
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Mr. Chartwell: A Novel
by Rebecca Hunt
(2/16/2011)
The conceit at the heart of Mr. Chartwell - the re-envisioning of Winston Churchill's famous bouts of depression as actual visits from a huge, slobbery black dog - is not cutesy or trite, as the book jacket blurb might lead one to fear, but clever and disarming. Rebecca Hunt engages the topic of depression in an inventive way, and the result is not a grim dose of hard truth but a playful meditation on the human condition. This is a novel about depression that even a depressed person can e
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
(11/3/2010)
Frazier has crammed an encyclopedic amount of information into this book, but never fails to keep the momentum going. A master of the good yarn, he can tease out the best stories and the most telling anecdotes from his material, whether the focus is on medieval history or escapades with fellow travelers. Many of the tales, facts, and historical tidbits Frazier relates are too good not to share, and readers may find themselves irritating their roommates and domestic partners by constantly poking
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Skippy Dies: A Novel
by Paul Murray
(9/22/2010)
With a masterful sleight of hand, Paul Murray has turned adolescence into a magical realist wonderland. This isn't Harry Potter, however - these kids are dealing with porn and drugs and lots of other heavy-duty reality. Murray navigates freely through multiple points of view, conveying the omnivorous flexibility of the boys' mental landscape and the way they exist as a sort of collective consciousness... I should say that before I began to discern flaws in the book, I had already entered
BookBrowse Editorial Review
This Must Be the Place: A Novel
by Kate Racculia
(8/4/2010)
The tone is funny and generous – youthful and hip without the trendy bite. Kate Racculia has put together an interesting mix of themes. Meditations on family, identity, romance, and creativity swirl around a compelling set of relationships, many of which come about by proximity rather than by design.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Private Life by Jane Smiley
(5/5/2010)
A historical novelist has two choices, to show how strange and foreign another time is, or to demonstrate that the past was actually not unlike the present. Smiley comes closer to the second path, sometimes relying on Victorian clichés to fill out her image of the nineteenth century – one character has "luxuriant" hair, another "spidery" handwriting. But the main thrust of her project is to connect the dots from Victorian times to modernity in such a way that we can see what a great gulf is be
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Mysterious Howling: Book I: The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place
by Maryrose Wood
(4/7/2010)
This novel is terrifically entertaining, so delicious in its personalities, settings, and language that you might not notice at first how nourishing it is - packed with positive thinking and sterling character traits... Girls are likely to appreciate Penelope as a role model, a Victorian Girl Scout leading them on. Boys are likely to enjoy the feral children and the hints of a werewolf plot, still to be unraveled. The book ends with many unanswered questions, and the expected "To Be Continued...
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
(2/3/2010)
Exploiting a beloved historical icon in fiction is risky business, but Chevalier dives in with gusto. Mary Anning, her subject in Remarkable Creatures, is a rock star to the natural history museum set, a feminist hero dangled before little girls to get them excited about science and to prove that paleontology is not just for boys... Chevalier takes a sensational figure (and Mary Anning was a real celebrity in her own day) and focuses on the quiet, unsensational part of the story. In this