A cellist for over eighteen years with the Golden Gate Symphony, Diane Frank writes about music with profound authority. Her deep understanding, knowledge and love of music in all its forms is evident throughout, whether it’s dissecting the Beethoven Quartets or describing the subtle performance of vibrato on a cello or delighting in banjo and fiddle tunes at a dance where people are waltzing, clogging, dancing contras. Her lyrical style is as elusive and rousing as the music in which she luxuriates.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of Room on the Sea: Three Novellas by André Aciman
These overwrought overthinking characters, some dubious, some convinced at the get-go by the gentleman’s parlor tricks, are epic romantics. You might even say emotional vampires. Back and forth between alternate lives on the Amalfi coast, and in New York City (where London Terrace apartments and the High Line figure mightily), these folks dive deep into their projections and unslaked thirst for completion.
A review of The Blue House by Sky Gilbert
Consider giving The Blue House a read if you’re interested in a detailed portrait of a manic depressive artist, following the lows and lows, with stunted highs, of a life lived on odd terms with art and bad terms with society and the people who inhabit it. If you have an interest in the mid to late century gay cruising subculture, you’ll also find fodder for thought here.
A review of Bodock by Robert Busby
The threads creating the tapestry are often thin, though. Rarely, if ever, will the same characters appear across multiple stories. There’s a joy to be found in wondering whether you’ve just met an unnamed character from a previous story, or if the same dinghy bar or stretch of road is being used as the setting. Despite the lack of crossovers, Busby still manages to make Bodock feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in town, with a community of believably-flawed people.
A review of 18 Shticks by Margarita Meklina
At forty-five pages, 18 Shticks isn’t a long collection, but it covers a lot of ground. Individually these are stories of ordinary lives made surreal through life’s twists, through close examination, and through a sense that just beneath the surface of any situation, there is another reality simmering.
A review of The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Moving from present to past with slim reflective passages, the novel examines more than individual responses to violence; it investigates cultural dissonance and our innate need to place blame on ourselves or the other, whoever that may be, and sometimes it’s us in an earlier life. A powerful examination of memory, resilience, reckoning, and acceptance, Di Pietrantonio’s novel marries fact with fiction to create a novel driven by secrets that must be relinquished and failings that must be acknowledged. It’s about honesty and truth.
A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Multigeneration Story Unlike Pachinko or One Hundred Years of Solitude
Although traditional readers might classify the 2007 work as historical fiction given its backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war in Kabul, the work is anything but your run-of-the-mill war novel. Through a mother-daughter story that focuses neither on a mother nor on her successive kin, Hosseini crafts a compelling narrative spanning generations that makes you question everything you thought you knew about a multigenerational (multigen) story.
A review of Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino
This is no ordinary collection. The Bertino omnibus features a Guignol-esque cast of characters readers will readily recognize because, flights of abstruse and absurd fancy aside, they abide and strive, hungry ducklings all, within each of us.
A review of The Pull of the Moon by Pip Smith
There is a magical quality to the island and the sounds, with all of its seasonal and tonal changes – the turtle and crab hatchings and migrations, the moon phases that make up the section headings, and the way in which the perspectives move around the island. Smith’s writing is poetic and she doesn’t tie everything up into a neat parcel. Instead she allows the characters to develop against the backdrop of an unfolding crisis that is very much a real one in our world.
A review of Men Behaving Badly and The Corona Verses by Tim O’Leary
With both Men Behaving Badly and The Corona Verses, both published by Rare Bird Books, Tim O’Leary proves himself a master of the short form, unafraid to wade into messy, uncomfortable terrain with equal parts irreverence and empathy. These aren’t just stories about individual characters—they’re honest reflections of a country in flux, where comedy and tragedy often sit side by side.