Category: Fiction

While the plot is predictable, and the setting (a fictional island in the very real Narragansett Bay, with some excursions to Portsmouth and Boston) didn’t have as much of a strong sense of place as I wanted/expected, and the characters talk like they’re from now, not 1846, I was still charmed by this book, which…

I somehow never had to read this book in junior high, high school, or college, so I don’t know if I would have disliked it as much as Tom Perrotta (who wrote the foreword to the edition I read) did when he first read it. Perrotta talks about how he “found the book strange and…

I think I bought this book my senior year of college and started reading it for a class I ended up dropping: I opened the book to find that I’d underlined/taken notes in the margins up to page 29, at which point I found a ticket stub for a student ticket to the ballet ($10!)…

In her introduction to the edition that I read, Anne Perry captures the appeal of the setting of this book, which takes place in the cavernous Palais Garnier, aka the home of the Paris Opera at the time the novel was written: “There are rooms beyond rooms, passages under and over other passages, and endless…

Like Animals makes me think of the Marina and the Diamonds song called “Savages”, though the vibe of Eve Lemieux’s book is more gritty and raw than the song. Like Animals tells us the story of Philomena, or Philly, in short dated chapters, which aren’t in chronological order: we start in 2019, jump to 2016,…

Early in this book, our narrator (Happy Doll, an ex-cop turned private investigator/security specialist) notes that he’s “become an armchair Buddhist,” which relates to the book’s title (which relates to the wheel of dharma). Happy thinks about karma and dharma and samsara, and co-exists with the ants in his sink rather than killing them, but…

Noir isn’t generally my genre, but my husband read this and loved it and I’m glad I read it too. The narrator is an ex-cop private investigator who finds himself trying to solve a crime that hits close to home while he’s also high on prescription painkillers and pot; in doing so he makes a…

In her introduction to the English translation of this book, Patti Smith writes that The Divorce “outlines the process for those wishing to comprehend or to experience the expansive possibilities of a single moment” (viii). That is a perfect description of this book, though it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting when I first picked…

Companion Piece begins and ends with “hello”, or some variation thereof, and that word, one we use all the time without necessarily thinking about the different ways we use it, comes up a lot in the book, most explicitly in a great section toward the end of the book about its possible etymologies and uses…

The protagonist of Meet Us By the Roaring Sea lives in Queens in the not-too-distant future: far enough from now that a building built in the early 2000s is described as old, but not so far from now as to be unrecognizable. The protagonist works in AI and technology has advanced—people’s consumption patterns are monitored…