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…
Posts tagged 2016 Books
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…
The Woman Upstairs
Nora Eldridge, the main character in Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs is a pissed. The late thirty-something third grade teacher and part-time artist is mad as hell and she’s gonna tell you all about it….
Black-Eyed Susans
After reading Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin I can see why these kinds of easy-to-digest thriller/mystery books appeal to so many people. These kinds of books are fun and entertaining and just engrossing enough that…