Category: Literary Fiction Reviews

A review of Take Me With You Next Time by Janis Hubchman

Hubschman has a close style with a mixture of tenses, one that always stays close to the mind of the woman whose story this is. She tends to chew to the pith with brief character descriptions: “…Nina was at least a half-foot taller than Joy with dark cropped hair and fashionable chunky-framed glasses”.

A review of Fog & Car by Eugene Lim

Eugene Lim has buried a layer of magic deep below the surface of the early chapters and it rises slowly as the narrative progresses. When it finally surfaces on the page, it shimmers along the edges of Sarah and Jim’s lives, turning the banal into the weird and supernatural.

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A review of Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Tóibín excels at novels from a woman’s point of view. Here he gives a sympathetic portrait of two women shaken by events and hoping for a second chance. The main male characters, Tony and Jim, lack the determination and character of Eilis and Nancy. Unthinking, they grab onto the first thing that comes along.

A review of Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman

Poetry gives suffering form, and giving suffering form is an antidote to despair.  Yet content matters, too.  For Wiman, much confessionalism is “an idolatry of suffering…an outrage that no person (or group) has suffered as we have, or simply a solipsistic withdrawal that leaves us maniacally describing every detail of our cells.

A review of Lucky by Jane Smiley

Smiley’s underlying theme, however, is the precariousness of this immortality. While presenting Jodie’s maturation  as a woman and artist, she  quietly notes some major historic events of the passing era.