Synopsis:
Life inside a 1970s TB ward from the point of view of a teenage girl who won’t take her treatment lying down.
Review:
A View from a Kite is a superlative young adult book, featuring a fresh, likable protagonist in an utterly fascinating setting. Gwen is 17 and has tuberculosis, so she lives in a sanatarium [...]
Popularity: 35% [?]
Tags: Canadian Literature
Synopsis:
A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think).
Review:
What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing [...]
Popularity: 77% [?]
Tags: British Literature
Synopsis:
A small boy deals with the death of his mother by setting his imagination free.
Review:
Up High in the Trees is a beautifully written book about a most engaging child, but it failed to move me. I’m not really sure why. Sebby, his brother Leo, his sister Cass, and his father are all dealing [...]
Popularity: 20% [?]
Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
A new house in a suburban Atlanta neighborhood spells disaster for all its inhabitants.
Review:
It’s awfully hard to be frightened when you’re sitting on a rooftop deck in West Hollywood, letting the setting sun dry your bathing suit after discovering that you can float like a cork in the saltwater pool.
Popularity: 67% [?]
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Popularity: 67% [?]
Tags: American Literature
Synopsis:
Schoolteacher Dunstan Ramsay looks back over his life, intertwined with that of a childhood friend and inextricably linked with a madwoman he desperately wants to believe is a saint.
Review:
I had no idea what I was in for when I began Fifth Business, the first book in Canadian novelist Robertson Davies’s Deptford trilogy. I have [...]
Popularity: 48% [?]
Tags: Canadian 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: 75% [?]
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Popularity: 75% [?]
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: 43% [?]
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Popularity: 43% [?]
Tags: American Literature
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: 54% [?]
Tags: British Literature
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. [...]
Popularity: 29% [?]
Tags: British Literature
In another incarnation I spent some time teaching screenwriting, which, as you may know, is all about structure. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there is no screenwriting without structure. Typically, that means three acts highlighting a tightly causal chain of events with linear narration. In films that [...]
Popularity: 31% [?]
Tags: On Reading
