Book Reviews Archives - Page 8 of 11 - Late Last Night Books

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Review of The Women of Rogers Street

10/13/15 – Review of Louise Colln’s The Women of Rogers Street

Don’t judge a book by its cover or its title. A blue-eyed woman’s image superimposed on colorful metropolis suggests a story of sunshine and roses, but that is not the story of The Women of Rogers Street. Ms. Colln has crafted an exciting and compelling, multi-themed, character-driven novel, that encompasses human trafficking, class differences, deceit, deception, adultery, and ultimately a journey to self-knowledge, redemption, and finding true love.

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10/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW—SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

10/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW—SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

Alice McDermott has written several highly acclaimed novels, including one that won the National Book Award and three others that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She also teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which is only about 20 miles up the road from where I live. Despite her obvious writing skill and her physical proximity, I had never read one of her novels until now. To introduce myself to her work, I chose her most recent novel, Someone, and I don’t regret my choice. Someone took me into the mind of a sensitive, yet strong, woman named Marie Commeford, who searches throughout her life to understand the line between joy and sorrow, a deep but narrow crevasse that seems to open and close at will.

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JOYCE RENWICK, IN PRAISE OF WHAT PERSISTS

9/20/15 REVIEW OF JOYCE RENWICK’S IN PRAISE OF WHAT PERSISTS “I kept finding the goat wandering in the dining room, or standing on the front room fireplace mantel just like she was wild on some mountainside… Pie Face was just an ordinary American mongrel milk goat, mostly black with white wedges under her eyes that gave her the name…[She] weighed about a hundred pounds and would chew or lick anything in sight that might contain minerals. She bit me every time I milked her so I’d gotten to expect it.”—from “The Goat” in the posthumous collection In Praise of What Persists.

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Review: Rachel Joyce’s The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

9/7/15 – Rachel Joyce, Harold Fry and Queenie Hennessey

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of sequels, and even a few prequels, because I’m working on a sequel of my own. I’ve also been reading a lot of books with older protagonists because my main character is in his seventies. So it was no surprise that I picked up Rachel Joyce’s The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, a follow-on to her enchanting best seller of 2012, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The principal characters are the same and the new novel is in many ways another chapter of the story, but it is neither a prequel nor a sequel. It’s an “equel.”

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The Seven Basic Plots

The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker
Review by Garry Craig Powell

Subtitled Why we tell stories, this book, which took the author 34 years to write, is not only Booker’s magnum opus, but one the great works of contemporary criticism. Building on Jungian archetypal psychology (and who isn’t a Jungian?) Booker’s thesis is that we read stories because we need to, in order to make sense of our lives, and more specifically because stories provide us with a blueprint for what Jung called individuation. For this reason, he contends, stories from all over the world, whether folktales or highly refined literary forms such as epic poetry or the modernist novel, or for that matter lowbrow entertainments like the James Bond movies, all tend to follow one of seven basic plots.

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A Review of the Works of Tana French

8/13/15 A Review of the Works of Tana French

It’s one thing when a writer wins a book award for a novel, especially if it is their first novel. But when the same writer wins awards for her subsequent novels, particularly if the novels are part of a series, you know something special is happening.

In 2008 Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods, walked away with just about every major award for the “Best First Novel,” the Edgar, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Barry Award. The novel was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2012, her third novel, Faithful Place, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Broken Harbor, her fourth novel, won the Irish Book Award for Irish Crime Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Mystery/Thriller category.

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Review of Katie Gilmartin’s Blackmail, My Love

7/20/15 REVIEW OF KATIE GILMARTIN’S BLACKMAIL, MY LOVE

“He looked up, looked me over, hat to oversize feet. ‘San Francisco changes people,’ he said drily, and returned to his paper.”

Yet the San Francisco we know today—the city so embracing of gay people—is not the San Francisco that existed in the 1950s when Blackmail, My Love takes place. The book resonated for me because I remember the fear I felt when, as a teenager in the early ’60s, I realized I might be homosexual and that, as I became an adult and remained wifeless, everyone else would suspect the truth.

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7/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: DARK ROAD, DEAD END BY PHILIP CIOFFARI

7/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: DARK ROAD, DEAD END BY PHILIP CIOFFARI

I love a novel that teaches me about a phenomenon or a historical event. In my past two posts, I talked about The Tilted World, which introduced me to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. This month I want to talk about another disaster that’s taking place even as I write: the smuggling of exotic and endangered animals, stolen from their natural habitats, into the United States for profit. Dark Road, Dead End, a novel by Philip Cioffari, explores the smarmy world of animal smugglers and the law enforcement officers who risk their lives trying to shut the practice down.

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Elena Ferrante: Italy’s Most Important Contemporary Writer

7/7/15 – Elena Ferrante: Italy’s Most Important Contemporary Writer

I wish I could introduce you to Elena Ferrante, but I can’t. The best I can do is make a stab at introducing you to her work. To some extent, of course, that is the case with all authors, although some writers appear so often in the media, we can be lulled into thinking we really do know them.

That is not a danger with Elena Ferrante. It’s not just that Ferrante is a pen name or that the author is reclusive. It is that she has, from the start, insisted her identity remain a mystery. When her first novel, Troubling Love, came out in 1991, she told her publisher that writing it was enough.

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6-23-15 GLAMOUR AND CLAIRVOYANCE IN NEWPORT

6-23-15 GLAMOR AND CLAIRVOYANCE IN NEWPORT

In her new novel Newport, Jill Morrow creates a mystery worthy of Masterpiece Theatre with unexpected and clever twists on the British model. One surprise is there is no crime and no death—until the gathering-of-the-suspects scene. And then there’s another surprise, and another.

It’s the 1920s and suave lawyer Adrian de la Noye is on a ferry to Newport. He’s on his way to an opulent sea view cottage, “beautiful in an old-fashioned, lavender-and-crepe sort of way,” at the insistence of his firm’s wealthiest client to draft a new will. At Adrian’s side is his awkward young colleague Jim Reid.

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RE-READING ANNE TYLER

6/20/15 Re-reading Anne Tyler: “She took the bowl of peas and brought it down on his head. It didn’t break, but peas flew everywhere.” Meet Pearl, having supper with her little girl Jenny and her two teenage sons in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: “Jenny’s face was streaming with tears, but she wasn’t making a sound and Pearl seemed unaware of her.

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Disarmed An Exceptional Journey

6/13/2015—Book Review: Disarmed An Exceptional Journey, by Ginger Manley.

The subtitle “An Exceptional Journey” for Ginger Manley’s, Disarmed, is indeed an accurate description of this remarkable memoir. It is a story of a fifty-year relationship with her husband, John Manley, a relationship with a doubtful beginning. It is an inspiring account of the couple’s fortitude in overcoming horrendous physical trauma, homelessness, and the overwhelming odds of keeping their marriage intact. The divorce rate in couples with a disability is ninety percent. This is the story of how the Manley’s beat those odds.

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A Different Kind of Summer Reading List

06/07/15 — A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUMMER READING LIST

When I was growing up, a summer reading list was big and heavy; heavy in the sense that it included those weighty tomes that you didn’t have time for during the rest of year—War and Peace, Ulysses, the Illiad. Gradually the summer list turned to beach reading, which was the exact opposite—easy books that you could read and enjoy without much thought. They provided an escape and a way to spend hours lying in the sun getting skin cancer without exerting too much effort. That seemed to lead to a burst in escapist literature of many genres: the kind of book you enjoyed but forgot as soon as you put it down.

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5/23/15 THE RAINS DOWN IN ZAMBIA

5/23/15 THE RAINS DOWN IN ZAMBIA. SONIA LINEBAUGH ON ALEXANDRA FULLER’S “LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME

Alexandra Fuller moved to Wyoming two decades ago—but it’s her twenty years growing up in Zambia that inhabit her psyche and her writing. I know, I know, it’s my third post in a row about Africa. And about heartbreak. I’ve been plenty of other places, and heartbreak happens everywhere, but Africa keeps coming to me.

The book is titled Leaving Before the Rains Come, words the author’s father said about deciding to sell his farm beside the Zambesi River. It refers as well to the author’s anfractuous path to leaving her marriage.

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In a Fisherman’s Language

5/17/2015 – In a Fisherman’s Language

As author of the 90s Club mystery series featuring the 90 year olds at Whisperwood Retirement Village, I give talks about the successes and accomplishments of people in their 90s and 100s. One of my prime examples is Captain James Arruda Henry.

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5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

In March 1927, after months of nearly nonstop rainfall, a levee on the Mississippi River near Greenville, Mississippi, collapsed with more than double the water volume of Niagara Falls. The deluge, combined with flooding from additional breaks in the levee system, covered 27,000 square miles in 10 states up to a depth of 30 feet. Authorities have called it the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. And yet many people have never heard of it. In their gripping new novel The Tilted World, Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly have righted that omission and brought the horrors and heroism of the flood to life.

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Book Review: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

5/7/15 – Review: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Some of my best friends are copy editors. No, really. After decades working as a journalist, and now as a novelist, I know how important copy editors can be, how often they save writers from embarrassing errors, and how underappreciated (and underpaid) they are. I’m also aware of the stereotype that suggests copy editors are obsessed, persnickety, humorless, and mean. Like most stereotypes, there’s some truth to it…but not that much.

Enter Mary Norris, the long time page OK’er at The New Yorker, and her new memoir, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book is actually a modified memoir—one part life story, one part inside look at the magazine, and two parts lessons on the rules of grammar and why they make sense (but sometimes don’t).

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4/23/15 DESIREE SAFARIS

4/23/15 DAN ELDON’S DEZIREE SAFARIS

The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. Death by the will of the people. I didn’t want to write about this death, but can’t seem to put it aside. It’s been almost twelve years since Dan Eldon’s death on July 12, 1993. I first learned about it from the book of his journals which I picked up on the sale table at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Dan didn’t die in DC. He was stoned to death in Somalia, a young white man in the wrong place at a most difficult moment.

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Gillian Flynn Times Three

4/13/15 GILLIAN FLYNN TIMES THREE

Gone Girl was all the rage in 2013 and into 2014, especially with the announcement of taking the book to film. Everyone I knew that had read the novel seemed to grumble about the ending. None of them seemed to like it. In fact they were outraged, as though they’d been cheated. I’m sure they would have asked for their money back if they could. Begrudgingly (probably due to my jealousy of Flynn’s flaming success) I decided that I would just have to read the darn thing myself, but first, my journey to Gone Girl would have to begin with Sharp Objects.

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4/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: LILA BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

4/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: LILA BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Lila is a novel about nothing and about everything. The plot is simple: an abused, neglected child is stolen by a woman and raised with a band of migrant workers until the woman disappears, and the child, now a young adult, is left to take care of herself. She spends time in a brothel in St. Louis and then one day wanders into Gilead, Iowa, where she meets John Ames, an older preacher whose wife and child died years ago.

The young woman (Lila) and John are drawn to each other by forces that maybe aren’t love, but are just as powerful. They marry, and then, almost by accident, they have a son together. That’s it.

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