Mark Flowers
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Experimental Fiction
Last week I asked how explicit is too sexually explicit for teens. This week I want to ask a similar question about form rather than content: how experimental is too experimental? This question, like last week’s, was keyed to a book I was reading, Book III, edited by Joshua S. Raab, and published by theNewerYork [...]
All in the Family
Today we look at three historical novels about very strange families. Taking things chronologically, first up is Sarah Dunant’s Blood & Beauty, about the very real, and very twisted Borgias of Renaissance Italy. Wikipedia lists among their crimes “adultery, simony, theft, bribery, and murder (especially by arsenic poisoning).” I quite like that parenthetical at the [...]
The Missing File
I’ve been meaning to post about D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File for several months now, but hadn’t quite figured out what to say. At first, I was looking around for another book to pair it with, in particular another mystery in translation because except for Sweden we don’t seem to get many mysteries from other [...]
Explicit Content
When is a book too sexually explicit to recommend to teens? That’s a question that comes up fairly frequently for our reviewers, and frankly, it’s one that I don’t know the answer to. For the most part it seems to be based on just our gut feelings–something like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement that “I [...]
Galatea
Readers of this blog might be interested to know about a new short story by Madeline Miller called “Galatea.” Miller wrote one of our favorite books of last year, The Song of Achilles. With this story she returns to the world of Greek myth, this time to the story of Pygmalion, which many of us know [...]
Fighting for Their Lives
Earlier this year, on my personal blog, I talked about how I had been reading a lot about crime, and specifically about wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project. So when I saw the subtitle of Susannah Sheffer’s book, I assumed that there would be quite a bit about defense attorneys fighting to prove their clients’ [...]
Someday, Someday Maybe
I got into The Gilmore Girls a little late, and only because my wife was a fan. I see from imdb that the show ran from 2000 – 2007, and I met my wife in late 2003, so the most I could have seen is a little more than half of the show’s episodes (I [...]
Tudor Trilogies
It’s tough to tell, because some titles are duplicated, but the Library of Congress seems to list somewhere on the order of 200 novels under the subject headings “Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509-1547–Fiction” and “Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547–Fiction.” Hey, we even reviewed one of them earlier this year. And those 200 titles don’t include [...]
Damaged Young Women
I’m very excited to introduce today’s novels, all three centered on emotionally damaged young women, and two of which are debuts that earn starred reviews from us. I read the two debuts–Panopticon and Lotería–in short succession, about a month ago, and I’m hard pressed to say which I’m more excited about–both introduce readers to ferocious new talents [...]
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