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Reviews tagged novel

Chosen By Desire (The Guardians of Destiny)

Kate Perry is a pretty kickass chick. Her childhood dream was to be a ninja, and she's now a seventh degree Kung Fu blackbelt.

When She Flew

In a fictionalized version of a true event that that happened a few years ago, an Iraq war vet and his young daughter are discovered living in the Oregon woods. When police officer Jessica Villareal hears that a young girl has been sighted in the woods and could be a runaway teen, she asks to be added to the search team. Jessica has always played by the rules, but finds herself heading towards forty and feeling like her job is the only thing she has going for her. She has an estranged teenage daughter and grandson who live close to her ex-husband, Rick in another state.

The Things We Do To Make It Home

When Beverly Gologorsky’s powerfully written and beautiful novel, The Things We Do To Make It Home, was first released in 1999, most U.S. residents weren’t thinking about war. The Vietnam conflict had ended decades earlier, the Cold War was over, and for at least a fraction of a minute, world peace seemed possible. Then 9-11 happened, and a world without armed conflict became the stuff of pipe dreams. In short order the U.S.

Girl Mary: A Novel

The Mary in _Girl Mary__ is known by many names and revered by many people. Type “Mary” into Google and the first match is a Wikipedia entry for “Mary (mother of Jesus),” her best known role. She is a major player in the spirituality of millions, yet much of her life remains a mystery.

A Black Tie Affair

Sherrill Bodine is back with more characters from Chicago's fated world of fashion and money in her second book A Black Tie Affair.

The Sand Castle

Sometimes, you can judge a book by it’s cover. In this case, the front cover of the book in question depicts two women in bathing caps and red lipstick and resembles a scene from an Esther Williams movie.

Bloodborn

Bloodborn is captivating from start to finish, keeping me reading from cover to cover. Not only was the plot intriguing, Kathyrn Fox kept you wrapped in the victims lives as if you were really there. You felt her emotions with every word you read. Without a dull moment in the story, this book has the mystery and suspense that will keep you guessing until the very end. Work driven, Dr. Anya Crichton has a lucrative career as a forensic pathologist.

Ballads of Suburbia

It’s strange to find yourself feeling nostalgic about a time that you absolutely hated. I’m obviously not alone when I say that middle and high school weren’t the best times of my life; while I had friends and family that I cared about a lot and vice versa, everything else often seemed like a total mess. Looking back on it with a few years distance, I can say that I blew things out of proportion, overreacted, was irrational in my words and decisions.

Anna In-Between

The premise of Anna In-Between is simple: Anna Sinclair, a thirty-nine-year-old editor at a big book publishing company in New York City returns to the (unnamed) Caribbean nation where she was born and raised in order to visit her parents, Beatrice and John Sinclair. While there, she learns her mother has advanced breast cancer, but refuses to go to the United States, which has better hospitals and equipment, for the operation that could save her life.

A Duty to the Dead: A Bess Crawford Mystery

It’s funny how everyone gets something different from a story. I like it best when a book is categorized in a genre that, after reading it, is slightly off from my own understanding. It makes it even more fun to read when my expectations are so astonishingly surpassed. A Duty to the Dead starts off with a bang. Before the end of chapter one, a gigantic wartime hospital ship, the infamous Brittanic, is at the bottom of the sea.

The White Mary

Marika Vicera is a war reporter who has dedicated herself to telling the stories of oppressed peoples around the world. She is giving a talk at Boston University when she meets a psychology doctoral student named Sebastian Gilman. Seb, as he is known, is in awe of Marika's war reports, which have landed frequently on the covers of major newspapers. Although Marika doesn't think much of the practice of psychology, she is taken with Seb. Marika takes a break from her globe trotting to write a biography of famous journalist Robert Lewis, who recently committed suicide.

Picara

Here’s the truth: right up front I judged Picara by its cover. The cover, a photo of a young girl sitting on a rail guard with a sideways gaze and unreadable emotion on her face, conjured up one word in my mind: Angst. Well, two words: Teenage angst.

The Children's Book

When I think of the works of author A. S. Byatt, I think of layers built upon layers and stories within stories. The first novel I read by Byatt was Possession, and I found the story of two modern day English professors solving a love mystery enjoyable. With that said, however, I also found the book to be overly detailed, thinking at the time that 100 pages could easily have been edited out.

Western

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas. - Laurence Sterne Anybody that doesn't want to get killed best clear on out the back. - William Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven Christine Montalbetti is the best shot in town. She'll slay you in the street at high noon. So if tender, easily digestible reads are your favorite, best clear on out the back. Jane Austen or Suzie Ormond, Western ain’t.

Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me?

Golondrina is the Spanish word for a (female) swallow, a noun. But to accept that in such strict terms would be an injustice to this literary artwork laid out by Bárbara Renaud González in Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me?. To swallow—the verb—would be to envelope or take in and also to accept or believe without question, anger, or protest.

How Perfect Is That

How Perfect Is That is a story of becoming. When Blythe Young begins her tale, her world is in the process of crashing down around her. Though she married into a wealthy Texas family, her mother-in-law was one step ahead of her and insisted upon a prenuptial agreement—an agreement which carefully stipulated no provisions for Blythe in case of a divorce.

Rough Magic

Most of Caryl Cude Mullin’s Rough Magic takes place on a magical island, the home of sirens and air spirits. When an exiled Queen bent on revenge and accumulating more power takes control of the island’s magic the fate of its inhabitants is left for the islands own control. Chiara, a young Princess with an interest and talent for magic, is ordered by her father to marry a Spanish Prince for his own ambition.

Racing the Dark

Racing the Dark is unique among fantasy books. The world draws upon Pacific Island and East Asian cultures to create a rich blend very different from fantasy canon—an island nation with an animist religion centering on sacrifice and binding.

Crossing Washington Square

Some novels are quite naturalistic, but toy with magic realism. This book is the reverse: a charming, modern fairytale that just happens to have been liberally sprinkled with astute observations about life in the English Literature department of a large university. Crossing Washington Square is a neatly crafted and satisfying story of two literature professors who approach their places within academia from different angles.

The Love Children

spoiler alert On May 4, 2009, I visited Jezebel, one of my favorite blogs, only to find out that Marilyn French had passed. She was one of the first feminist thinkers to open my eyes to issues surrounding womanhood, the dominance of patriarchy, and expectations of the female gender.

Easy on the Eyes

On the heels of her 2006 book release Flirting with Forty—which would become a Lifetime movie—Jane Porter shines in her latest novel Easy on the Eyes, which focuses on a woman fighting the ravages of time.

When I Forgot

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. – Clarissa Estes The protagonist of this short, dense novel is Anna Louhiniitty, a twenty-something Finnish journalist. It’s a slushy April day in Helsinki. Anna sits at a café table. She’s supposed to be transcribing an interview. On the table sits a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that famous novel of war, suicide, and society parties.

Little Bird of Heaven

Oates' thirty-sixth novel grapples with familiar themes: the rocky underside of marriage, racial injustice, childhood trauma, sexual obsession, and the ways gender plays out among various subsets of the U.S. working classes. The story is set in fictitious Sparta, New York, a once thriving town seven-to-eight hours north of Manhattan. A former center of industry, the area was left high-and-dry when the factories that employed almost everyone relocated in the 1970s.

So Happy Together

So Happy Together is Maryann McFadden’s second novel in which the themes of love, change, and nature—along with a strong and very human woman protagonist—are at the heart. Claire Noble is a forty-five-year-old woman in the “sandwich” generation; she has to juggle living her own life while caring for her daughter, as well as her aging parents.

American Adulterer

I’ll admit I am neither a friend of celebrity culture or the particular brand of it that centers on the Kennedys. I am, however, interested in sexual politics and thus in the normative institutions of marriage and monogamy and the hardly less institutionalized behaviors of male bonding.

Yes, My Darling Daughter

“Such a pretty girl. Four years old; well loved by her young mother, Grace. But there’s something...'off ' about the child.” The above excerpt sets the scene for Margaret Leroy’s Yes, My Darling Daughter. Margaret Leroy offers a novel that is so original and suspenseful it pulls you in from the first page. The story involves Grace, a single mother who works full-time at a London flower shop, and Sylvie, her four-year-old daughter.

Geek Mafia

Rick Dakan’s novel, Geek Mafia, tells the exciting tale of Paul Reynolds, a recently unemployed comic book artist/videogame designer who befriends a wild crew of techie con men and women living in Silicon Valley.

The Women's Room

Marilyn French’s The Women's Room, first published in 1977 and republished this year (a re-release ironically in the works before French’s death last May), has been touted as one of the most influential novels of the second wave of feminism. The book reads like a combination of a personal journal and a traditional novel.

The Others

_I read all the pages the Google search engine would give me when I typed in the English words homosexual and bisexual. The pages that came up made my head hurt. I felt as though they were forcing upon me awareness, an acknowledgment, of an orientation that was not really mine.

The Old Garden

A garden is a metaphor for revolution. When painstakingly cared for, dry and barren ground can eventually yield the most beautiful of things. A garden can change an unruly landscape to an ordered plot, produce food and purpose, and forever capture the energy of a gardener with loyalty, conviction, and a love of what it could become.
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