The Nickel Boys, a multi-award winning novel (Pulitzer Prize, Kirkus Prize, National Book Award Nominee, etc etc etc), deserves every accolade. It is based on events that occurred in a reform school in Tennessee that for 111 years abused and neglected boys sentenced...
Tom Clavin brings to life another episode in the American Wild West during the late nineteenth century, this time focusing on the Daltons. The Last Outlaws deals with the Dalton gang (later becoming the Doolin-Dalton gang) that cut a reign of terror from Kansas and...
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras is semi-autobiographical fiction in the vein of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is a masterful debut novel set in Columbia during the time it was controlled by 128 paramilitary groups, including Pablo...
I read the first two in Daniel Hecht’s Cree Black series, City of Masks and Land of Echoes, which are genre-bending mixes of mystery, paranormal, horror, and ghost stories. Cree Black is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist who works for a company that investigates...
Jodi Picoult brilliantly blends multiple points of view in Handle with Care, a well-researched novel about a child born with osteogenesis imperfect (brittle bone disease). Picoult also tackles multiple difficult topics (wrongful birth, medical malpractice, our...
Hello Wife has a lot in common with Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver as both deal with the problem of drug addiction in contemporary America, though I preferred the Kingsolver version. Charlotte Lansing, the protagonist of Hello Wife, is a fifty-something woman...
The Pasha of Cuisine reminds me of another Turkish book I read recently, The Architect’s Apprentice by El if Shafak. Both are set in the Ottoman Empire, are based in a tradition of oral storytelling, and have a dash of magical realism. When the old sultan dies, his...
I’m continuing my quest to read the entirety of Larry McMurtry’s works. In The Last Kind Words Saloon, McMurtry returns to the late nineteenth century American West of Lonesome Dove. This is a sequel of sorts to Telegraph Days but with a different cast of characters...
This is a review of all 1424 pages of the multi-award winning Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, I don’t read much science fiction these days but grew up reading now-classic sci-fi from notables like Asimov, Le Guin, Heinlein, and Clarke. The Broken Earth series...
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...
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