And so we come to the end of Elena Ferrante’s epic story of the lifelong friendship of two Neapolitan women. In The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante continues to write on themes of feminism, politics, family, and community dynamics through her memorable characters. Book Four sees Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo into middle age and beyond, with their complicated relationships to creativity, men, their children and each other. This book also brings the reader back around to the mystery introduced in Book One: what […]
A New York Love Story
Saint Mazie is the fictional story of a young woman in New York City. Told through Mazie’s diary excerpts and interviews with those who knew her or knew of her, the story begins in 1907, when 10-year-old Mazie received the diary as a present, and runs until 1939, when the entries end. From the first pages, we learn that Mazie was a woman of some note in the Bowery, a queen to some, a saint to others, and yet she questioned whether or not she […]
What if PG Wodehouse had written Wuthering Heights?
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons is a marvelous send up of brooding romantic literature in the vein of the Bronte sisters. In addition to a crazy woman upstairs, a dark and hunky cad, crazy gibberish talking locals, and a plucky dauntless heroine, Gibbons gives her reader some hilarious dialogue and overall goofiness that is difficult to resist. Gibbons represents the best of British humor a la Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome and of women writers of the 1930s such as Dawn Powell and […]
Being of Two Minds
Patricia Highsmith might be best known for her Ripley novels and their film adaptations, but Strangers on a Train, her first novel, set the path for her career and has likewise been adapted several times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It is an unsettling, suspenseful psychological thriller that features brutal crime and some deep philosophical pondering. Guy Haines, an up and coming architect, is on his way home to Metcalf, TX, with the expectation that his philandering wife Miriam is going to finally […]
Clueless
I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]
Not every unhappy family is interesting
Reviews of this novel from NPR and The New York Times were effusive. The NPR reviewer called Among the Ten Thousand Things suspenseful and compared it favorably to Gone Girl. The NYT reviewer was impressed with Pierpont’s writing style and the way she structured her novel, as well as with her mature character development given that Pierpont is only 28 and this is her first novel. While I can see why the NYT reviewer feels this way, my overall impression of this story was … […]
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