As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
Slow Medicine
One of my dearest friends sent me this book for Christmas. I’m glad she did because I had never heard of it, and it’s not something I necessarily would have picked up in the store myself, but it was a fascinating read. God’s Hotel is the story of one doctor’s journey and experience with the last American almshouse in San Francisco called Laguna Honda Hospital. It’s also the story of some of her patients and the changing over from practicing “slow” medicine to providing “efficient health […]
Courtroom thriller without the usual Lescroart oomph!
Neither as meaty nor as finely drawn as Lescroart’s earlier and more emotionally complex thrillers, The Fall nonetheless fits the bill for a combination murder mystery/courtroom drama that dovetails with this country’s soaring racial tensions between police and African-Americans. The Fall deals with the first major legal case of Rebecca (“The Beck”) Hardy, daughter of Lescroart’s serial hero Dismas Hardy. The Beck is now an associate in Hardy’s law firm and gets her first chance at a murder trial in defense of one Greg Treadway, […]
A captivating true 19th century Chinatown murder mystery
Frog Music is stuffed full of characters, humor, drama, sex, and tragedy. It sprawls across the stage in technicolor, a stunning contrast to Donoghue’s earlier book Room, which confined her two protagonists—and her readers–to a tiny claustrophobic space for much of the story. And yet Frog Music has carved an aching and tender place in my heart, just as Room did. Frog Music takes place in 1876 San Francisco, and is based on the true story of the murder of street denizen Jenny Bonnet, a […]
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 […]
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