Writer Kseniya Melnik moved with her family from Magadan to Alaska when she was 15. In this collection of short stories, she deftly introduces readers, who most likely are unfamiliar with Siberia — home of the Gulag prison camp system, to the people of the cold and remote city of Magadan in the Russian Northeast. The stories are set in the post-Stalin years, from the 1950s with the Khruschev thaw, through the Brezhnev stagnation and into the age of Glasnost and Perestroika. These are not […]
Do Androids Dream of … Revenge?
With this 2013 novel, Ann Leckie has won the Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and, as of last week, Hugo awards, and has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award. Ancillary Justice has a complex, fascinating plot and in its protagonist a kickass corpse soldier. I picked up the book because the author is a woman (serves my quest to read 50 books by 50 women this year) and it has won so many prestigious awards. I’m often wary of Sci Fi — it’s not […]
A Story About Chinese Americans (No Concubines!)
The Year She Left Us is a first-rate novel from a first-time novelist. Using the western adoption of Chinese girls as a plot device, it examines issues of abandonment, adoption and assimilation; the relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters; and, like Mary Karr’s memoir, the impact of “lies of omission” on a family. The Year She Left Us is the story of Ari, her mother Charlie, her aunt Les and her Gran — the Kong women. Gran was born and raised in China, coming to […]
Like most people, he lied best by omission….
Mary Karr’s award-winning memoir of her early childhood in 1960s East Texas reads like a novel. This poet knows how to spin a yarn, and in this case, a mostly true story that focuses on the years she was about 6-8 years old. Mary and her older sister Lecia lived in a dysfunctional household, to say the least. At the center was their mother, an alcoholic who was battling depression and rages, the origins of which are revealed at the very end. Karr is an […]
Artists + Ghosts = Good Story
This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like a haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. The Hundred-Year House is the fictional story of an artists’ colony called Laurelfield, just outside Chicago near Lake Michigan. In the afterward, Makkai writes that one theme is the need artists have for community. Other themes would be the masks that people wear, hiding themselves from even those […]
A Time Traveler’s Homage to Jerome K. Jerome
If you are a fan of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) or PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, this novel is sure to please. Willis is a well known and “decorated” sci-fi author, having won multiple Nebula and Hugo Awards. She discovered JKJ through reading Robert Heinlein and gives him a tip of the hat in an amusing, clever and thoughtful work that combines time travel, mystery, and comedy of manners. It’s 2057 London and Ned Henry, an […]
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