I wasn’t sure what I was getting in to when I picked this book up at the library. The blue cover caught my eye when I remembered that one of the items on this Reading Challenge 2016 was to read a book with a blue cover. A quick scan of the book plot description and in to the book bag it went. What I came home with was a story that is part memory and recollection, part association, part regret and part hope. As 78 […]
Life is full of magic when you are waiting for death
Hands down, one of the best novels I’ve read in some time. Let’s just get that out of the way. Rene Denfeld takes an old, decrepit prison and fills it with the the worst, and best, in humanity. Told from the heartbreaking point of view of one death row inmate, what unfolds is a slight but powerful story of shame and redemption. Denfeld takes her own experience as a death row investigator hired to try and get reprieves for men who have done the most wretched […]
Too many subplots that could have been novels themselves
Seems like books about orphans are a “thing” lately. Well, I can only think of Orphan Train, which I read last year, and of course the main character in A Little Life, also read last year…but I digress already. This orphan is a Jewish girl in a New York City Jewish orphanage system in the 1920’s and onward, placed there with her brother after her father accidentally murders her mother and takes off for the road. Early in her life, Rachel Rabinowitz and her other […]
Does any of us truly have an original idea?
Blink, the 2007 book by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and other interesting neuroscience and psychology books), easily translates research into compelling storytelling around the kinds of decisions those first few seconds of perception lead us to. He finds common themes when looking at how doctors diagnose heart attacks, how art experts judge authenticity, how people speed date, or how military leaders plan for battle. One of my favorite parts had to with the “Harding effect” — voting for a handsome but clueless […]
Who Are We, If Not Ourselves?
We Are Not Ourselves, the debut novel by Matthew Thomas, tells the story of the struggles and triumphs of several generations of an Irish-American family as they travel through last half of the twentieth century and into our modern time. But this description may make it seem as if we are getting a sweeping look at a large boisterous immigrant family – when what really end up with is an intimate look at the life of Eileen Leary, the daughter, mother, wife, nurse at the […]