All Book Reviews

In her latest, THE GOOD LIAR, Catherine McKenzie demonstrates the same strong handle of suspense narratives that readers enjoyed in Fractured and Smoke. The story is told from intertwining perspectives, though the bulk of the pages follow the strong and relatable...

Jonathan Miles places an unprepossessing character at the center of his sharply satirical novel, ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE. His hero, Cameron Harris, is a cypher, hardly the kind of guy anyone would expect to set off an international cause celebre. But that’s just...

From the publisher: “In 1968, a disillusioned and heartbroken Lillian Carlson left Atlanta after the assassination of Martin Luther King. She found meaning in the hearts of orphaned African children and cobbled together her own small orphanage in the Rift Valley...

She was a tough kid. Still, even having read EDUCATED, Tara Westover’s blistering family memoir, I’m hard pressed to figure out how any child—no matter how resilient—could come away intact, let alone garner the prestigious academic degrees (M.A., Ph.D.)...

Set in the time during and right after the Civil War, THE WHICH WAY TREE immediately engages the reader with the voice of Texan Benjamin Shreve, 17 years old as we begin the novel, but younger in the tale he tells us. Let me correct myself—his purpose in sharing his...

“She honestly couldn’t say whether flying made people weird, or whether people were inherently weird and a closed cabin just made it more apparent.” In his latest novel, Chris Bohjalian leverages the  sometimes bizarre, sometimes terrifying world of air transit,...

The amount of time we spend on the job—the getting ready for, the getting-to, the getting-from, the long hours doing it and the longer hours worrying about it—make JIllian Medoff’s smart, funny novel, THIS COULD HURT, especially pertinent. The author has penned...

Historical fiction has the capacity to entertain, educate, or horrify. In BEFORE WE WERE YOURS Lisa Wingate manages all three. Through one family’s nightmare, Wingate explores the atrocities that took place at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society between 1920 and1950...

“Theirs was the kind of life that did not guarantee living.”  Moving forward in time from generation to generation among the same families—Ken Follett style—HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi narrates the early slave trade powered by the British and powerful South African...

Given the rise of #MeToo, the timing of THE POWER is uncanny. Whether you’re in alignment with that movement or not, surely you’ve fantasized—at least once in your life, right?—about what would happen if the high heels were on the other feet. In this new...

A love story lasting some 400  years would seem the province of vampires. But Tom Hazard is no vampire: even though he’s 439 years old (though he looks about 40)—he’s fully human. Tom suffers from anageria, a rare but not unique medical condition. To have...

A great idea isn’t always a good idea—a trap John Banville may have fallen into with MRS. OSMOND. Banville has written his newest novel as a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James’s 1880 classic ends ambiguously with his heroine, Isabel Archer...