Chicanery, greed, a desire to capture and sell North Pole inhabitants to a zoo, parental love, friendship, and a little magic all come together to create a memorable tale well worth the reading.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
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A review of The Restorer by Michael Sala
Maryanne’s own sense of self in relation to her overbearing mother and Freya’s sense of self in relation to Maryanne are handled with such richness that they give the story a great deal of depth, even as it pushes towards its inevitable outcome. The Restorer is a beautifully written and very powerful fiction that not only shines a light on the deep roots of domestic violence but also plays with the line of what remains in the face of such destruction. Sala’s story that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.
Strange Migrations: on the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
For the cast of characters the present has no meaning. They are suspended between the places they have left and a fantasy of a future home. These are the superimpositions of images that color their thoughts, their dreams, and their narratives – the binaries of home and abroad, the past and the future, the real and fantasy.
A review of Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry edited by Ginny Lowe Connors
Edited by Ginny Lowe Connors, this intimate commentary of historical women of common and uncommon nobility by dozens of contemporary, mainly American poets could strike the common fancy of any adult who opens the book. Especially in the political climate too many women face today.
Two Tickets to Venice: The Waters of Eternal Youth by Donna Leon and The Girl From Venice by Martin Cruz Smith
Venice is one of the most beautiful cities in the world with architecture, canals, and history that make it a prime setting for a mystery. Two favorite authors, Donna Leon and Martin Cruz Smith, have books set in Venice that take you on two very different journeys to La Serenissima.
A review of Line Study of a Motel Clerk by Allison Pitinii Davis
Art, in this messy overlayering, produces “some kind of complicated, collective accuracy.” Like the best works, Line Study gives a sense of speaking to the present as if to the future. “Because the ones who wrote today’s edition,” as Davis writes in the titular and final poem, “have already written tomorrow’s.” Should we all be so lucky to actually hear Tiresias speak.
A review of Porch Light by Ivy Ireland
In the opening line, Ireland poses a question about the relationship between the individual, and a theory of everything: “If you consulted your own cipher mind (if what presents as yours could be compressed in such a lazy line), would it encircle this whole ball of string/theory/or only what lies beneath?” In the world of Porch Light, the answer is yes.
A review of The Golden Child by Wendy James
The plot moves fast, the narrative driving the reading towards its final unnerving twist. It all happens almost too quickly. James’ writing is so smooth, and the story so powerfully plotted, that its easy to miss how neatly the shifts are between the individual voices, the many delicate links between cause and effect and the parallels between adults and children as we move from one character to another, the way the reader is unwittingly drawn into the toxic culture of privilege that underpins these characters, or how subtle the thematics.
A review of Secret of Abbott’s Cave by Max Elliot Anderson
Anderson has created a high interest, action packed, easily read, adventure filled chapter book certain to please middle grade readers. While my career spanning nearly 4 decades was spent in the K 1 arena, Secret of Abbott’s Cave is a book I used during the two years I taught Osage County fourth grade in Osage County. It was a book with good appeal for both girls and boys.