Synopsis:
Accused of murder, a troubled young woman tries to piece together the odd facets of her life, starting with her supposed immaculate conception.
Review:
The chapters in Madapple alternate between a teasingly opaque courtroom case, and defendant Aslaug’s reminiscences about life with her disturbed mother and eventual reunion with her long lost aunt and cousins. Nothing [...]
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Tags: American Literature
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.
Popularity: 57% [?]
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Popularity: 57% [?]
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Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
8th Grader Tess sees the world through algebra, but when her mother reveals her best friend might have murdered his wife, Tess can’t make anything add up!
Review:
Secrets, Lies, and Algebra is a great book for middle school readers. Lichtman intersperses mini-math lessons throughout, but she does it in such a way that it feels [...]
Popularity: 31% [?]
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Tags: American Literature
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.
Popularity: 54% [?]
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Popularity: 54% [?]
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Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
Trapped in a coffin, popular teen Cass McBride works to find a strategy to reach freedom, even as the police trace down dead lead after dead lead.
Popularity: 43% [?]
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Popularity: 43% [?]
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Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
When Mary was 16, she may or may not have been abducted and raped by an older man, whose life was ruined by her accusations.
Popularity: 90% [?]
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Popularity: 90% [?]
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Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
After she befriends secretive An-Ling, a menopausal wife and mother’s family collapses under the weight of a lifetime of lies that may have lead to An-Ling’s murder.
Popularity: 53% [?]
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Popularity: 53% [?]
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Tags: American Literature
My review of Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand is up on Blogcritics.org. Here’s the opening paragraph:
How Cass Neary, the protagonist of Elizabeth Hand’s latest novel Generation Loss has stayed alive this long is anyone’s guess. Super young, super talented and super stoned at the birth of punk below 14th Street in the 1970s, Cass [...]
Popularity: 35% [?]
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Tags: On Reading
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 [...]
Popularity: 64% [?]
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Tags: British Literature
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 [...]
Popularity: 59% [?]
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Tags: British Literature