Tag: fiction
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I don’t know what it is about some books, but from the moment I see the cover or hear the title of the book, I’m instantly convinced that it is a book I MUST read. They are usually quiet books like The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which is another book I love. I…
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I don’t typically post quotes from the books I read on the blog, but this book is filled with these simple and profound statements (never mind that they are undercut by doubt and different logic most of the time), so I thought I’d share some: “That was a dream, of course, but many of the…
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Published in 1963, Mary McCarthy’s novel follows eight young women following their college graduation (Vassar class of ’33). These women are educated and intelligent yet they are not immune from either the economic pressures of the Depression nor of societal pressures to be meek and fall in line. Without giving too much detail about any…
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In the past I’ve really enjoyed Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series, which is about English spies during the French Revolution. She is really skilled at intermixing different time periods and showing how our history influences our present. This book is no different. This stand-alone novel gives insight into the dying world of balls and debutantes…
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I find that it always takes me a while to get through Donna Tartt’s books, but that the effort is always worthwhile. Her writing is so intelligent, so tightly controlled, and you get drawn into this parallel universe where insane things can happen and seem quite rational. Her characters are flawed, interesting, and dynamic. She…
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I’ve read a lot of books with a similar premise to Alice McDermott’s (like Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers and Mary Costello’s Academy Street). The focus on a single life gives an author room to show how each of our lives are significant, and how they are interesting in all of their distinct particulars. What…
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Mary Costello’s book follows a similar path as the last one I read by Cynthia Ozick. They are both books that detail the trajectory of a single life. But Costello’s book is much quieter and much sadder. The events that occur in Tess Lohan, the protagonist’s, life are not driven by herself. Tess allows life…
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I think it’s very interesting when authors write about their own families, as I’ve mentioned before (when discussing Andrea di Robilant. Michele Zackheim was researching this history, thinking she was going to write non-fiction about her distant cousins, but she was swept into the story and characters and wrote something completely different. As you may…
Allison Burris 