Prophecy is the second of a trilogy of historical fiction novels that take place in Elizabeth I’s England, where the so-called “art of diplomacy” is but a thin veneer for a war of intelligence over which empire—French, English, Spanish– will reign in Europe and beyond. The year is 1583, and the Italian philosopher/mathematician/astrologer/poet and former Dominican monk Giordano Bruno has fled the Catholic Inquisition in his homeland and settled in the “relatively more enlightened” city of London, where he lives in the home of the […]
Advice on Love and Life
This compilation of advice columns was recommended to me by my 25-year-old daughter, the same daughter who introduced me to Cannonball Read and whose taste in literature I admire 99% of the time. Not a devotee of the chicken soup series, I was—to put it mildly–reticent to read something subtitled “Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar.” But after reading one question to “Sugar” and her reply, I was totally hooked. “Sugar” is the name taken by Cheryl Strayed, best-selling author of the memoir […]
A dark tale of colonialism and liberation in Africa
This is a remarkable book about religion, racism, sexism, feminism, colonialism, capitalism, socialism … and about an amazing family that came to Africa as missionaries and learned truths that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with humanity. The Price family arrives in the then-Belgian Congo of 1959, headed by Southern Baptist Reverend Nathan Price, a wife-abusing, child-abusing, fanatical tyrant and bitter disappointment of a man. He and his captive wife Orleana and his four daughters arrive unwanted in an impoverished Congolese village […]
Monks and Spies in Tudor England
Okay, I’ll confess I read this trilogy out of order, and–worse–I reviewed them out of order, but I still highly recommend them if, like me, you’re an afficionado of good historical mysteries. Even more so since I just learned that this “trilogy” is about to have a sequel. Anyway… In this third novel, it is now 1584 and our hero Giordano Bruno is being stalked by someone through the streets of London. He has made a lot of enemies in Parris’ previous two books, and […]
We Need to Talk About … Jacob
This book proved somewhat painful reading, but is well-plotted, well-written and packs quite an emotional wallop. Defending Jacob is half murder mystery and half courtroom drama, told from the standpoint of Jacob’s father, who is a first Assistant District Attorney at the start of the novel, and thus gets first dibs on one of the more sensational murders to hit his town, that of a 14-year-old boy found stabbed to death off a path in a popular park used by town kids to get to […]
Another Grim Dystopic Future by Atwood
Another of Atwood’s famous dystopic novels, this one the first in a trilogy based on an apocalyptic future after the genetic manipulators and profit-mongers have prompted a sort-of “Noah’s Flood” in the form of an engineered plague to wipe the slate clean. Crake, the genius who created the plague, is gone but his “children” live on as a handful of bioengineered innocents intended to repopulate the world under new—Crake’s– guidelines. Crake’s appointed “shepherd” for this flock is Jimmy, now known as the Snowman, who managed […]
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