Sometimes, a girl just needs a trashy romance novel on a rainy night, but I’m not sure this was the trashy romance novel I needed. The storyline was okay, I suppose. Young, fiercely independent single mom Elissa Towers lives with her young daughter Zoe, making it on her own with no family to help, save for her elderly neighbor, who helps watch Zoe while Elissa works. Elissa has sworn off men until Zoe is out of the house, but then former U.S. Marine Walker Buchanan […]
Empire Falls Lite
I read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls a few years ago and described it as a slow burn. I put it down several times, thinking I was bored with it, but after a few days, I found myself thinking about the characters and then devouring 150 pages at a time. Mohawk had the same effect on me, only reduced by about 50%. Set in Mohawk, NY, a dying northern industrial town, Mohawk is very much like Empire Falls in that it’s not really about anything other […]
Relatively Charming
Charming Billy is a quiet little novel that takes place over the course of one day at Billy Lynch’s wake. Our narrator is the adult daughter of Billy’s best friend Dennis, and she is telling the story to her husband, who isn’t at the funeral. It’s an unusual narration, and one that took me quite awhile to figure out, but it works within the context of the story. The story begins at a bar after the funeral, where approximately fifty mourners have gathered to eat […]
BUY THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY
Thorn arrived in my mailbox for the Kid for her birthday from my friend who lives in Alaska. Her wife went to college with Intisar Khanani, and so they sent her a signed copy and a note that maybe I should read it first. And since I was in a slump, and she had a book report due on something else, I snagged it, not expecting a whole lot, which just goes to show you about expectations, because this book blew me away. Thorn is […]
Reality Bites
I picked up Domestic Violets in the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble and opened to the first page, where our hero Tom Violets was deep in the middle of a conversation with his penis, desperately trying to give it a pep talk, because his wife was waiting in the bedroom, dressed in Victoria’s best, and his little buddy was not cooperating. If my penis were a writer/director, it would be Woody Allen – small, neurotic, and, frankly, hit or miss. Just as things are […]
Leaving’s hard, but it ain’t the hardest thing
Boss read Descent about a year ago and praised it quite a bit, but I dismissed it because the way he described it didn’t really hold my interest. He gave me the basic premise and just kept telling me that it was good, but I wasn’t in the market for a mystery or a thriller, and so I shrugged it off as we tend to not always have the same taste in books. But then I was at Barnes & Noble recently, and nothing else […]
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