Book reviews on contemporary fiction.
Dolores Claiborne is a haunting novel, but not in the way you might expect given the author is the great King. Aside from a brief ghostly encounter, the story doesn’t revolve around supernatural phenomena or evil beings. This is the story of a hardened island woman off the coast of Maine and what she had…
A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess in England and, despite the “ultraviolence”, it became a worldwide sensation. It could have been forgotten while fading away into obscurity with new generations of books to take its place in shock value, but that seems impossible for the time being because of Stanley…
Celeste Ng is a rising talent in the world of bestseller authorship. She was published in a few anthologies and then she came out with her first novel, Everything I Never Told You, a massively popular pick for books clubs everywhere. Most recently, Little Fires Everywhere has been the “IT” book for the past few…
We Live in Water is a collection of short stories by Jess Walter. Though the stories are fictional, each of Walter’s characters feels very real. Characters whose traits you may see in yourself or people that you know. The stories are based in small towns, with everyday people trying to survive. Harper Perennial | February…
The Financial Lives of Poets is a work of fiction that follows our main character Matt through the current downward spiral that is his life. He is days away from losing his house (unbeknownst to his unassuming family), suddenly aware of his wife’s sudden disinterest in their marriage, jobless and living with his father who…
Swedish sensation Fredrik Backman has been providing the world with hearty laughs and tender smiles through his runaway international success in A Man Called Ove. It’s a favorite among book clubs and perfect for beach reads. And it helped get me out of a reading slump. Washington Square Press | May, 2015 | Paperback |…
Set in Maine and extending through New Hampshire and into Vermont, The One-in-a-Million Boy is a contemporary novel that focuses on a short but unique bond between a young boy and a feisty centenarian, parental grief, and new horizons. Thus far, it has been published in eighteen different languages. You can read about local Maine author Monica…
Hag-Seed is the fourth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series published by Hogarth Press in which popular authors pen their versions of selected Shakespearean plays. In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson tackles The Winter’s Tale. In Shylock Is My Name, Howard Jacobson re-imagines The Merchant of Venice. Pulitzer Prize winning author Anne Tyler takes on…
Recently released, The Lost Girls by Heather Young is a novel that switches between past and present and one that provides characters marked by disturbed minds rivaling those in Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train but with the added satisfaction of actually being believable. This is the story of a young six-year-old girl who vanished without a trace…
Recently published in January of this year, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (what a title, eh?) is described as “The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin”. Taking place in the span of one turbulent day, it chronicles the intersections between police officers, protesters, and one delegate during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. Little,…