Mostly Fiction BOOK REVIEWS
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Book Awards
(updated 11-19-06)
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(updated 1-19-07)
Complete List of Books Reviewed
| "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it." William Styron | ||
| March 1, 2007 | ||
“I’m sick. I might die,” seven-year-old Estella confesses to her younger sister Connie, in the prologue of Kristy Kiernan’s debut novel. “I have eyecue. It’s bad. I have a lot of it.” As children, Connie and Estella were best friends-until Estella was discovered to be a math prodigy, which led to the sisters' estrangement. Now, years later, they are forced to reunite on the Gulf Coast of Florida as they pack up their childhood home and ready it for sale. (read review) | ||
| February 28, 2007 | ||
Fourteen-and-half-year-old Margherita lives with her eccentric family on the outskirts of town, a semi-urban wilderness peopled by gypsies, illegal immigrants, and no end of bizarre characters: a reassuring and fertile playground for an imaginative little girl like Margherita. But one day, a gigantic, black cube shows up next door. Her new neighbors have arrived, and they're destined to ruin everything. (read review) | ||
| February 27, 2007 | ||
Detective Michael Bennett is about to take on the most sinister challenge of his career. The nation has fallen into mourning after the unexpected death of a beloved former first lady, and the most powerful people in the world gather in New York for her funeral. Then the inconceivable occurs. Billionaires, politicians, and superstars of every kind are suddenly trapped within one man's brilliant and ruthless scenario. Bennett--father of ten--is pulled into the fray. (read review or excerpt) | ||
| February 26, 2007 | ||
"The place is Harlem. The time is the early 1940’s. World War II is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. That’s the setting for Kevin Baker’s superb historical novel Strivers Row. Harlem is a seething tinder box of rage, ready to explode at the slightest provocation; word is filtering back on the mistreatment of Black GIs, here at home (particularly at military bases in the South) and overseas. The injustice of it all is approaching the boiling point..." (read review or excerpt) | ||
| February 25, 2007 | ||
Autumn has arrived in Algonquin Bay, and with it an unusual spate of suicides. The most shocking victim yet is Detective John Cardinal’s wife, who has finally succumbed to her battle with manic depression. As Cardinal takes time to grieve, his partner, Lise Delorme, handles an unsavory assignment: a young girl appears in a series of unspeakable photos being traded online. Delorme is desperate to find the girl before she suffers more abuse. When Cardinal receives a string of hateful anonymous notes about his wife’s death, he begins to suspect homicide. (read review or excerpt) | ||
| February 23, 2007 | ||
2095. After long months of travel, the gigantic colony ship Goddard has at last made orbit around Saturn, carrying a population of more than ten thousand dissidents and visionaries seeking a new life. Among Goddards missions is the study of Saturns moon Titan, which offers the possibility that life may exist amid its windswept islands and chill black seas. (read review)
The surface of Venus is the most hellish place in the solar system. The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed spacecraft landers as though they were tin cans. The sky is perpetually covered with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and poisonous gases. This is where Van Humphries must go. Or die trying. (read review) | ||
| February 21, 2007 | ||
"Even as one reads the precisely observed nuggets of suburban life that make up Arlington Park, one starts to worry. Could this book be classified as “Mommy Lit?” and shoved aside? For that would be a pity because Arlington Park is chock full of a quality vital for good fiction -- empathy..." (read review) | ||
| February 20, 2007 | ||
"I’m Not Julia Roberts from author Laura Ruby is a novel of manners written for the bleak realities of the 21st Century. The novel spits and crackles with wicked humour while chronicling the petty, nasty dysfunctional relationships between several middle-aged divorced urbanite couples. This often painfully funny look at the roles of ex-husbands and ex-wives..." (read review or excerpt) | ||
| February 19, 2007 | ||
"Without a trace of romanticism, Patrick O'Keeffe recreates the lives of four sets of characters who live in and around Kilroan, a small town on the southwestern coast of rural Ireland. Winner of the Story Prize for the four overlapping stories/novellas in this book, O'Keeffe depicts the hard lives of those who did not emigrate, those who stayed behind..." (read review) | ||
| February 18, 2007 | ||
It looks like just another car crash: a head-on collision on a lonely stretch of desert highway that leaves one driver dead. But Tom Valle, the local newspaperman assigned to the story, is damned good at spotting lies. And for Valle, once a star reporter at America's most prestigious daily, this so-called accident may be just the ticket he needs to resurrect his career and get him out of the aptly named town of Littleton, California, for good. (read review and excerpt) | ||
| February 16, 2007 | ||
When Dr. Caryn Dryden is found floating dead in her hot tub, homicide inspector Devin Juhle targets a suspect close to home: her husband, Stuart Gorman. After all, Stuart was recently asked for a divorce . . . and he stands to gain millions in insurance. His alibi—that he was at his cabin on Tamarack Lake that weekend—doesn’t keep him out of hot water. But maybe a shrewd attorney will. Gina Roake, a partner in Dismas Hardy’s firm, is eager to take on such a high-profile case. (read review) | ||
| February 14, 2007 | ||
As a writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion has an unparalleled reputation as a no-nonsense journalist who cuts to the heart of an issue. The beauty of her prose has always derived from the clear-eyed precision of it, the way a phrase nails down a truth without flourish. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's style is startling as it turns inward to the exploration of bereavement and the struggle to survive it... (read review) | ||
| February 12, 2007 | ||
Auster’s thirteenth book turns out to be a worthy synopsis of his first twelve, an excellent place to start for those who haven’t read one of America’s most prolific and under-celebrated authors. (read review) | ||
| February 11, 2007 | ||
A quirky coming of age story about recent high-school graduate and former child prodigy, Colin Singleton who has had his heart-broken by one too many Katherines. (read review) | ||
| February 9, 2007 | ||
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor ... (read review) | ||
| February 7, 2007 | ||
Once upon a time there were two fast friends--Ali and Mamed who were as different as could be. Yet they struck a friendship that lasted nearly 30 years. The setting for this story is Morocco but the essential truths that pervade this slim novel by award-winning writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, are universal ... (read review)
This Blinding Absence of Light from Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun is the fictionalized account of the imprisonment of a young Moroccan soldier for his involvement in a coup attempt against King Hassan II in 1971... (read review) | ||
| "The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it." Jim Harrison | ||
| February 5, 2007 | ||
The undisputed queen of psychological horror, Norwegian author Karin Fossum takes an up-close view of three deaths in this novel in which Evil even touches Inspector Konrad Sejer's own family. ... (read review)
From the dramatic opening paragraphs, in which a person believes that his face is sliding off and his insides are falling out, Fossum captures the bizarre inner worlds of several characters barely holding onto their sanity. ... (read review)
After being widely translated in Europe, it's about time that Fossum's excellent police procedurals are becoming available in English. The story starts with the disappearance of a young girl in a small Norwegian village, but adroitly segues into a murder investigation as the search for the girl turns up an unrelated naked corpse. ... (read review) | ||
| February 3, 2007 | ||
Kate Shugak is the heroine of A Deeper Sleep, Dana Stabenow's fifteenth novel in this long-running and successful series. Kate is a "120-pound package of strength, and courage and intelligence and humor" who, after spending five years as an investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney's office, went into the PI business for herself ... (read review or excerpt) | ||
| February 1, 2007 | ||
After the sudden death of her five-year-old daughter, Stella, Rhode Island writer Mary Baxter finds herself unable to function. As Mary wades through her fog of grief--barely able to feed herself regularly--she receives a phone call--an invitation from “Big Alice.” ... (read review) | ||
| January 30, 2007 | ||
Set among the Gypsies in Slovakia after World War II, McCann's new novel follows Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition and a poet by accident as much as desire. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe ... (read review or excerpt) | ||
CATCHING GENIUS 
MARGHERITA DOLCE VITA 
from 2 reviews
STEP ON A CRACK 
from 44 reviews
STRIVERS ROW 
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS 
from 8 reviews
TITAN 
from 12 reviews
VENUS
ARLINGTON PARK 
I'M NOT JULIA ROBERTS 
THE HILL ROAD 
DECEIT
from 20 reviews
THE SUSPECT
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING 
TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM 
AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES 
THE ECHO MAKER 
THE LAST FRIEND 
WHEN THE DEVIL HOLDS A CANDLE 
A DEEPER SLEEP 
THE KNITTING CIRCLE 
ZOLI 
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