Eleanor Flood is a crackpot. Well, she’s not, really, but that’s what I thought when I started reading this brilliant, funny story of a day in this character's life. In a direct, quirky, first-person narrative, Eleanor tells us that she’s not happy with her life. “Today will be different” is her mantra. Everything seems great…
“One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother Beverley, thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.” Thus begins Commonwealth, Ann Patchett’s seventh and most autobiographical novel to date. Like its first…
This past Saturday, October 8th, was the First Annual National Indie Author Day. Libraries and authors across the nation celebrated the Indie movement. At Cook Memorial Public Library we hosted a viewing of the Indie Author Day Live Panel, and a short discussion where Local Indie Authors were able to network and share tips. Professionals…
I am a huge fan of television legal dramas, and am still mourning the fact that "The Good Wife," one of my all-time favorite television series, has concluded its run after seven great seasons of epic courtroom battles, office intrigue and politicians run amok. Alicia Florrick, high-powered attorney and wife of the disgraced Governor of…
I have a weakness for compelling, lyrical writing. I also have a weakness for page-turning, character-driven suspense. Sometimes I am lucky and find authors who can do both really well. Two writers who come to mind are Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke. And now I can add another name to that list: John Hart.…
U.S. Rep. John Lewis I lived a sheltered childhood in a small, virtually all-white Wisconsin town in the 1960s. The tumult of the decade reached me only when my parents had the television turned to the CBS nightly news with Walter Cronkite. I was 11 when the country was torn apart by the assassinations of…
Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis opens with this chilling line: “This is how I kill someone.” Alex is a senior in high school on track to be valedictorian. She does her homework, but stays in the background of her small town. Alex is known as the girl whose sister was brutally murdered a…
J.D. Vance’s fascinating memoir about growing up with his hillbilly relatives offers glimpses into why so many Americans in the white working class are angry and pessimistic. Vance is a conservative, young Republican who survived a tumultuous childhood. His family started out in Kentucky’s Appalachia and migrated to Ohio to find work at growing factory…
In her first foray into adult fiction, best-selling young adult author Gayle Forman has written a book that every working mother will relate to. Maribeth Klein, adopted daughter, magazine editor and forty-four-year-old mother of twins, is working so hard trying to juggle all the pieces of her life that she doesn’t realize she’s having a…
“The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.” ― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad Cora, the teenage protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, is an unlikely…
