Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy is a sweet novel about a little girl named Frankie, whose mother dies the day she is born. She is raised by a community of well meaning people in a small Dublin neighborhood. Her Father learns about her only weeks before she is born, and tries hard to give up drinking, find a better job and do the best he can to raise Frankie. He has help from a wonderful array of characters who try…
The Miniaturist is the highly popular new novel by Jesse Burton. Set in Amsterdam in 1686, the story is based on the actual miniature cabinet house made for Petronella Oortman, on view today in The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. This is the one historical truth in the novel that Burton imagines her story around. It is a fascinating portrait of 17th century Amsterdam at the height of the Dutch East India Company. There are many secrets being kept in the house Petronella…
Hurricane Sisters is a novel by Dorthea Benton Frank set in Charleston, South Carolina. It focuses on the lives of three generations of women. Told from several points of view, sometimes the novel worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was a little preachy about domestic violence and abuse against women. There are some very sobering facts here about how many women die each day due to domestic violence and how South Carolina leads the country in the number of homicides….
In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame (author of An Angel at My Table) is a newly published novel ten years after Frame’s death and forty years after it was written. Harry Gill has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, and he arrives in the small French village of Menton, only to find the Memorial Room where he is supposed to write, cold, dank and with no facilities. Frame is a wonderful writer, and this is quite a funny little novel…