And so we die-hard fans of Salman Rushdie keep turning the pages, hoping for a reward commensurate to the journey. PositiveThe Washington PostIf Room was a horror novel laced with sweetness, Akin is a sweet novel laced with horror... Caribbean Netherlands.
He's also got a great ear for the anxieties of dating, and the sweet comedy of middle-aged sex... dark elements provide emotional ballast to what might otherwise have been a merely silly tale. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next... Robinson remains so focused on Jack's ruminations that whatever Della may be thinking by loving him back is exalted as an ontological fact beyond scrutiny. Ron randomly pulls a pen out of a box. Someday, we'll get a great novel about this era, and when it comes, it won't need anonymity to grab our attention. It's a vertiginous experience, gorgeously rendered but utterly devastating.
The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. If you're willing to have your vague impressions of the dispossessed brought into scarifying focus, read this novel. Ron randomly pulls a pen image. When the various parts of this ramshackle plot finally came together, I couldn't tell if I were truly grateful or just suffering from Stockholm syndrome. That spooks the kids, of course, but the only real magic here is Benjamin's storytelling. PositiveThe Washington PostNot everyone will take this little book and eat it up. Hannah never risks ambiguity; her pages are 100 percent irony-free. Despite the novel's whimsical opening, this is largely a story of sadness and smothered hope.
Exploring the fluid relationship between writer, reader and interpretation, it's equally audacious and brilliant... As a satire of psychiatric hospitals and prisons, the novel is frighteningly insightful. Many pages of the novel are given over to acerbic arguments in which Serenata spars with her husband about his rabid training. And at first, the advance praise sounds wholly deserved. It's a tremendously enlivening dramatic effect... One of the many pleasures of this story stems from Vera's emotional range... a passionate love story purified in the crucible of suffering.... All these intimate and finely drawn details are nested within a masterful work of historical fiction that traces monumental economic and political currents... Vera never reduces him or any of her characters to mere cogs in this vast system. RaveThe Christian Science MonitorThis quiet new novel from Marilynne Robinson couldn't be less compatible with the times – or more essential … Ames's narrative is a mixture of wry commentary on the ministerial life, heartfelt reflections on God, and passing observations on what's happening that day. And he's a master at letting the weirdness of situations slowly accrue. Floating somewhere between realism and fabulism, The Wall doesn't fully harness the benefits of either mode. Ron randomly pulls a pen photo. But the best parts of The One Inside are those least hobbled by its fractured structure and mannered dialogue. Not much of a meal, perhaps, but who could handle more now?...
She mentions that she started reading Greek the way one of us might mention that we started watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt... One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next... It's also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century... A novel that switches between two different periods and tones confronts the essential challenge of rendering both competing story lines engaging, and Great Circle struggles to make that case. United States (USD $). That may sound baffling, but it's compellingly done — a constant process of filling in context and meaning, solving some mysteries and raising others... One of the challenges of writing fiction about a great artist is how to convincingly create the presence of artistic genius.
But Armfield exercises an exquisite — even sadistic — sense of suspense. Indeed, Plain Bad Heroines may be the only novel I know that should come with an EpiPen. Indeed, the range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound... incomparably bittersweet... Fortunately, it almost feels too late or at least superfluous to celebrate the fact that this remarkable collection will not be shunted away to a back shelf for \'Gay & Lesbian Literature\'... brilliant. There's nothing boring here, though. For as often as we hear that some novel about a wealthy New Yorker suffering ennui is a story about 'how we live now, ' here is a novel that actually fulfills that promise, a story whose grasp is so wide and whose empathy is so boundless that it provides an ultrasound of the contemporary American soul... RaveThe Washington PostO'Farrell creeps into this gloomy realm of intrigue with an inkwell full of blood and a stiletto for her pen... O'Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station... O'Farrell's manipulation of time and point of view keeps us vacillating between sympathy and skepticism... You may know the history, and you may think you know what's coming, but don't be so sure. Impatient readers will be tempted to regard this foreword as a bit of extraneous throat-clearing, but, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's introduction to The Scarlet Letter, these opening pages establish the haunting relevance of the story we're about to read.
Homes is working in the same dark territory, but The Unfolding provides a different kind of insight into this privileged species — and a lot more comedy... Unfortunately, what should have been a mere 300-page novel became a 470-page tome. PositiveThe Washington Post\"... a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses. The Far Field offers something essential: a chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible—and honest enough to make them real. It's too sincere for dystopian satire, too earnest for cultural parody... How, in short, do you live? RaveThe Washington a new classic of war fiction. Of trials increases. The Night Watchman is more overtly it's a political novel reconceived as only Erdrich could... As usual, modern realism and Native spirituality mingle harmoniously in Erdrich's pages without calling either into question... In the most magical way, the narrative seems to melt, transforming this modern-day crime into the ancient tale of Pericles... We're used to such molten transitions in film, but seeing one take place so flawlessly on the page feels like sorcery... The result is a rare novel that encourages you to read as though your sanity depends on it — just a little further, just a little faster. He does this 4... Social Studies, 12.
But if Burnt Sugar is often as unpleasant as a sinus infection, it's just as hard to shake off... \'Burnt Sugar\' perfectly captures this story's complex flavor, the taste of something sweet transformed into something deep and melancholy. Her descriptions of these shiny people, so casual and friendly in their tightly choreographed habitats, reminded me of when I moved to Washington... Indeed, it's a move that doesn't seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself. Separately, their stories are captivating, flush with peril and sexual tension... What's even more remarkable are the chameleon shifts in tone and style as Smith jumps from story to story with perfect fidelity to each era.
Oyeyemi has built her house out of something far more complex than candy... dizzying... Even as the story moves into the 21st century, it still feels fusty, like an antique speculation about how people might live in the year 2017... Indeed, the ferocious discipline of these two sisters is matched only by the author's.