The Girls is the debut novel by Emma Cline that’s gotten a lot of buzz so I was curious to read it. Beautifully written and heartbreaking all at the same time. Cline explores the interior life of lost teenage girls who get caught up in a CA cult at the end of the 60’s led by an enigmatic, yet creepy older guy; yet she fails to capture the essence of the times and how this place might have seemed a…
I was so excited to read The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker and I couldn’t have been more disappointed. This is non-fiction, with the sub-title How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World. I wish I could invite Tucker to spend just a few hours with me and my cats to prove how wrong most of the information in this book is. If you’re truly a cat lover you will most likely disagree and dislike…
The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens is a novel about 4 broken people who get lost on a Mountain in Southern California for 5 days and not all of them make it out alive. Told years later by a Father to his son, it’s a harrowing tale of survival and bravery, family and friendship. I didn’t really enjoy the book as I kept waiting for the inevitable bad things to happen. However, it was well written, and if you like…
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is a memoir by a brilliant scientist telling of her early days in her Dad’s lab in Minnesota, through her education and struggles to make it as a female botanist with a lab of her own. She shares the journey with her eccentric lab partner Bill and eventually a husband and son. She is now a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii. Part personal history, part a love story to science and plants, this…
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child, is historical fiction based on the 1885 exploration of Lt. Henry T. Allen into Alaska after the US purchased it from Russia. In the novel, Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small party up the Wolverine River into totally uncharted territory encountering Native American Indians along the way, facing starvation, and meeting shamans and other mythic creatures that blur the lines between the human and animal…
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell is a novel set in the remote countryside of Ireland, in London and NYC. This is one of the few books I’ve read that skips around in time, is narrated by several different people, yet was very easy to follow. O’Farrell has crafted a wonderful story of a man in love with a reclusive ex-movie star, who has children in two different parts of the world and is thrown into chaos when…
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio is a novel about a mother and her son and daughter who leave their father behind and escape Cuba on the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. They head north to start a new life in Connecticut. The mother eventually meets a Dutch tobacco farmer and they all seem to be settled in their new life in America. However, the call of one’s homeland is hard to silence. Palacio does a good job of showing just how…
The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick is a beautiful book which traces two families back and forth through centuries as they follow comets around the world. Francios, a French chef living with his mother who sees and talks to ghosts, family members who have passed; Roisin, an Irish astronomer who has left her small village to travel and see the world, struggling with ghosts of her own. When these two meet at a lonely outpost in Antarctica, they find an…
Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter is a novella, a poem, a fable, an essay on grief; it is impossible to categorize, it is simply a brilliant piece of writing. After an accidental death leaves two young boys and their father alone without their mother, Crow comes to visit, and stay. Crow, trickster, therapist, shaman, baby-sitter, mythological figure, call him what you will, he is here to stay until he is no longer needed, kind of like…
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is a novel about Sofia, a daughter who has traveled to the coast of Spain with her mother Rose seeking a specialist to find a cure for Rose’s limb paralysis. It is a mysterious illness that has plagued her for most of her life, with no apparent cause. Sofia’s life is on hold while she tries to attend to her mother. This is her somewhat late coming of age story, a deep look into her…