Synopsis: An English society family is thrown into turmoil when one of their own marries a shifty Italian, and they’ll do anything to see that their child is raised properly–that is, in England. Review: EM Forster has been my latest classic discovery. I’d never read anything of his before last year, and I’m completely in love. Where Angels Fear to Tread is a short book that made me linger over every word, to my tremendous delight.
I was making my way through The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble, thinking I was really enjoying it, when I realized on about page 75 that it was utterly failing to hold my interest. I couldn’t figure out why, because I generally love these kinds of books–portraits of women rooted in a time and place, books like The Group by Mary McCarthy or Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman. This book has strong, faceted female characters and the prose is layered yet lucid.…
Synopsis: A long ago summer idyll at a manor-turned-commune ended in tragedy, and the recent discovery of the bones of a woman and a baby threaten the secrets carefully guarded by the young man who inherited the home. Review: It may be a lesser Barbara Vine, but A Fatal Inversion is still an above average read.
Synopsis: Harry Potter braces for his final battle with evil Lord Voldemort, knowing that only one of them will survive. Review: My biggest criticism of Harry Potter has always been his passivity. In the first few books especially, he spends most of his time being rescued or protected, simply because he’s “The Boy Who Lived.” And for awhile, it seemed as though JK Rowling wasn’t paying attention–was creating a hero who didn’t deserve to bear that name.
Synopsis: Upon discovering that she has a great-aunt who’s been in a mental institution since the age of 16, Iris has to decide how much she’s willing to allow her life to be changed.
Synopsis: After a supremely sheltered childhood, a young woman finds herself without her mother for the first time in her life, and tells her new lover the story of the crime that led to her emancipation.
My review is up at Blogcritics.org–here’s the first paragraph: It’s tough to make intellectuals sexy, but Natasha Mostert, a London-based South African novelist, pulls it off in Season of the Witch, her newest novel and a tour de force of Gothic eroticism that seduces from start to finish without reprieve.
Synopsis: A woman haunted by the uncertain onset of a genetic disease sees a woman from her past, and struggles to fill in the gaps between truth and lies from a time in her life marked by violence and murder. Review: House of Stairs is yet another knockout from Barbara Vine, the British crime writer who pens the Inspector Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell. The tease here is that Vine isn’t going to reveal the identity of the murder victim until the final pages, and…
Synopsis: A young man on the verge of university is blinded in a freak accident. Review: Henry Green’s later books Loving, Living, and Party Going were referenced quite a bit in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, but I chose to start with Blindness because it was listed in the infamous 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s a slim volume, and I breezed through it, though Green’s marvelous turns of phrase caused me to pause and relish.
Synopsis: After the death of the tortured aunt who edited her grandmother’s best-selling diaries, a second-generation Danish-British woman seeks to find out the truth of her aunt’s parentage, which may be linked to an infamous murder case. Review: The complexity of Anna’s Book (originally published as Asta’s Book) is reminiscent of A Dark-Adapted Eye, and both books are now tied as my favorite of the books crime novelist Ruth Rendell has written as Barbara Vine. Both books deal with a tangled family history as revealed…