I loved Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Tom Lake, so I can't figure out why it took me so long to get around to reading The Magician's Assistant. Guy Fetters is an abused teenager from Nebraska who leaves home. After erasing his past, he becomes a successful magician,...
In Keeper'n Me, a semi-autobiographic novel, Garnet Raven is stolen from his aboriginal family by the twentieth-century Canadian government and placed in residential schools and a string of foster homes until he ages out of the system. Finding people like...
This is not-quite-a-western novel, though it has cowboys (Tom Mix) and a trail drive. It’s a historical novel that spans the ritzy East Coast and the wilds of Mexico with a cast of characters ranging from a fictional railroad robber baron to real-life personages such...
I bought Out Stealing Horses based on the cover (horses galloping over a plain) and the title, assuming it was a Western. Wrong on all counts! It is a quiet book that blends the present with several aspects of the protagonist’s past—and is set in eastern Norway near...
Robert Olen Butler begins a new series, the Christopher Marlowe Cobb thrillers, in the vein of the noir novels written in the 1920s, which follow the war correspondent who gives his name to the books. In The Hot Country, Cobb goes to Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914 to cover...
Blood Sisters and The Bone Thief are the first and second novels in Vanessa Lillie’s Syd Walker thrillers about Native American women. While both can be read as a standalone novels, readers will get more out of the series if they read them in order. In both, Lillie...
Reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake is like taking a breath of fresh air scented by cherries from an orchard. It’s a fascinating revisiting of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, to boot. Lara, a teenager who tries out for the part of Emily in Our Town on a whim, goes on to...
With the recent death of the world-renowned anthropologist, Jane Goodall, I decided to tackle Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson, a 755-page biography that has been on my to-be-read pile for eons. I have followed Goodall’s life since I was in...
In The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks expands what little is known of the Old Testament biblical hero, King David, through the first-person lens of his seer, Natan. From vacation Bible School, I was familiar with the story of the young David using a sling to kill the...
Murder in the Garden of Enchantment is an Agatha Christie-style novel set in high-society Istanbul in 1900. The Paris Exposition with its electric lights and moving sidewalks was bringing new ideas to Turkey. A profligate prodigal son is called home from Paris to...
As the white mother of an adopted black son, The Color of Water really resonated with me. James McBride is a Black novelist, journalist, and musician who has written a unique memoir, told in two points of view, his own and that of his mother, and chronicles their...
The Blue Between Sky and Water is a lovely book by Susan Abulhawa, the most widely read Palestinian author in history. Like Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water is very pro-Palestine, understandably since Abulhawa’s father was a Palestinian freedom...
A Fine Layer of Dust deals with the stressors that rip a seemingly perfect family apart. Sophia has a great career at a museum while Jake is a lawyer chasing an elusive promotion to senior partner. To achieve that, he’s spending long days away from his wife and...
Bad Country is C.B. McKenzie’s debut novel, a Western noir set in Arizona’s Indian country and the seedy sections of Tucson. The protagonist, Rodeo Grace Garnet, is a former rodeo star who turned private investigator after he broke his back rodeoing. He is...
This is my second reading of The Merchant of Prato, a book I first read in the 1980s, shortly after returning to the US after living for years in Italy and suffering from nostalgia for Tuscany. The small town of Prato is only fifteen miles from Florence and has close...
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