When I read a review of Alice Adam’s Invincible Summer that described it as a novel that attempts to define a generation, specifically GenX, I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough. I’m all…
Posts tagged 2016 Books
More Bitter than Sweet
Tess is a twenty-two-year-old running from, I think, boredom, claiming she was reborn when she crossed the George Washington bridge. Upon arriving in New York City, Tess gets a job at one of the best…
Nothing But Writerly Shenanigans
For a wholly different and more enthusiastic take on All the Missing Girls, I’d like to direct you to LeAnn’s review. She loved this one. I did not. A few weeks ago I expounded on…
So Much Smug
First things first, Wendy Walker’s All is Not Forgotten starts with a pretty graphic description of rape. Teenage Jenny Kramer is brutally raped for an hour outside a party in her affluent Connecticut town. When…
Sticks the Landing
Not much will keep Katie and Eric Knox from helping their fifteen-year-old achieve her Olympic gymnastics dream — not mountains of credit card debt, falling apart cars, or their younger son, maybe not even murder….
Mystery at a Northwestern Minnesota Lake
Lucy Evans is the last of the Evans sisters and as she’s dying she writes her life story, recalling the summer of 1935 when her younger sister Emily mysteriously disappeared at the family’s lake home…
All the Whining with None of the Story
When the first six or seven chapters of Jennifer Close’s The Hopefuls were nothing but backstory and a comparison of how vasty superior New York was to Washington, D.C. I should have stopped reading. I…
Doing Nothing Else But Reading This Book is Cool Too
I tend to avoid essay collections/memoirs by bloggers. This is a little strange, considering I’m an aspiring author with a blog that turned 16 years old last month. But a lot of times when I…
Reading About Awful People
Fern and Edgar Keating are awful people. They are spoiled, wealthy brats who meet, marry, have three children, and live a charmed life bouncing from a home in Boston to a summer home on Martha’s…
Backstories Better Than the Plot
There is a scene in the beginning of Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans that shook me. It’s one of those scenes that makes you pause and think about what it must be like…