Holmes likes to use language vividly and originally. Cars “crept to the curb on tire tiptoe”; a woman walks in a “toothache of time”. Holmes also uses patterns of imagery to convey her themes. In one of my favourite stories, “Nuts and Bolts”, a childfree couple choose not to spend a holiday with friends – the “same old bunch” with a third baby among them, but to stay in the city together.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Fit, Fifty, and Fired Up by Nigel Marsh
That so many men (and some women) live lives of servitude and never stop to think about who they are or what they might want to really achieve in the short space that we have is a modern tragedy. Marsh gently and humorously makes this obvious, and in the changes he’s created in his own life, sets a trend that others can easily follow.
The Adventures of Tintin: Young Readers Edition by Hergé, with extra material by Stuart Tett
For new audiences, especially the younger set, the convoluted plots can often be a little tricky, and Stuart Tett has created a new series that is faithful to the original Hergé version but that adds in lots of material to help situate the stories.
A review of On the Road to Infinity by Mark Logie
The thirteen poems in this chapbook cover a range of themes, working between personal turmoil and political issues. The book works between a number of dichotomies: sickness and health, sanity and insanity, youth and age, city and wilderness.
Two Men In Love (I Didn’t Know You Were That Black): Rahsaan Patterson’s music album Wines & Spirits; and Jericho Brown’s poetry book Please
What separates human accomplishment and failure? In the slinky, seductive “No Danger,” using rhythm as a sign or symbol of desire, Rahsaan Patterson describes love as protection against the cruelty of indifference; but in the song that follows, with a theme of unhappiness, “Pitch Black,” a cross of rock and funk, featuring Patterson’s low voice, a fat slow beat, and guitar feedback, there are “pitch black panic attacks.”
A review of The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
The Bellwether Revivals has been compared to Brideshead Revisited, because of the brother-sister relationship and the social class element. The ending, however, is reminiscent of that of Sons and Lovers, that great coming-of-age working class novel by D.H.Lawrence, following in Thomas Hardy’s tradition.
A review of The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding
There is an intense intimacy in Solding’s writing style. The words come as a confession: a kind of whispered tale that draws the reader in and invites collusion. The characters progress naturally through time, beginning with key moments of youth and awakening perception, and moving through coupling, and later parenthood.
A review of The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb
It’s nothing like the aching devastation witnessed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—to some extent it’s still life as usual in dust-choked Pueblo—but The Bird Saviors might well depict the early days of Cormac’s bleak and terminal catastrophe.
A review of What It Takes to Become a Chess Master by Andrew Soltis
To illustrate the range of the book, one chapter looks very specifically at sacrifices and different kinds of compensation, another at how to aim for decision-friendly positions, where there are clear, straightforward plans and the moves are relatively easy to come by.
A review of First Light by Kate Fagan
The grammatical syntax is also inflected, though not enough to lose the coherency. Instead, the conjunction of familiarity and distortion provides a cognitive dissonance that, mingled with the lovely imagery, is simultaneously pleasing and intellectually tricky.