Diamond is the only Black person left in Swift River, now that her father has disappeared.  She is a 300-pound teenager who lives with her white mother.  She has neve… Read More

The title refers to a small agricultural town in southern California, inhabited by a number of characters in this book, along with their extended families.  The first such charac… Read More

This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction.  Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a rem… Read More

Cassandra Williams, our first-person narrator, is 12 and her brother, Wayne, is 7 when Cassandra tries to rescue Wayne from drowning.  She loses consciousness on the beach from the effo… Read More

This book has received so many accolades, but I just did not love it.  I did love that the author elevates Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn on his adventures down… Read More

This crime thriller is a sequel to the 1995 movie Heat, which I think I saw but do not remember at all.  No matter.  I loved this book anyway, and I think it stands just fine on it… Read More

I wish authors and editors would realize that the eBook format does not accommodate footnotes very well.  They all appear at the end of the chapter, so that all context is forgotten.&nb… Read More

For some reason I thought this book was a novel, and that misconception may have skewed my impression of it.  It is actually a collection of linked stories about Jamaican-heritage famil… Read More

This book just does not measure up, despite its Pulitzer Prize, to this author’s Lark and Termite and Quiet Dell, both of which I loved.  The two timelines, 1864 and 1874, are ver… Read More

This novel takes up where Oh William! left off, but it’s not imperative that you read Oh William! first.  In fact, Strout’s characters from previous novels appear flit from… Read More

Kiki, the first person narrator, is in her second year at Whitewell, a fictional English university, where she has a campus radio program called “Brown Sugar” that provides women… Read More

Two teenagers, Freda and Florence, have run away from home in the last 1920s to seek fame and fortune as dancers in London.  Freda has some talent, but Florence—not so much. … Read More

Helen’s husband, Arthur Purcell, is managing one of his industrialist family’s manufacturing plants, which has been converted from a sewing machine factory to a munitions arsenal… Read More

Who exactly is the title character in this novel?  There are several candidates, all real historical figures and all men.  Eliza Touchet, however, is the central character here, a… Read More

The Berlin wall has just come down, and former East German intelligence officials are either destroying documents or trying to sell them to the CIA.  This novel opens with the death of… Read More

Nora is a literary agent who agrees to accompany her younger sister, Libby, to Sunshine Falls, NC, for a month in August.  The town is the setting for a best-selling novel that one of N… Read More

I loved Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but this novel was a disappointment for me.  I also generally love time travel novels, including Stephen King’s 11/22/63… Read More

This novel about a filthy rich family focuses on three very smart women.  Darley gave up her trust fund so that she could marry Malcolm without a pre-nup and gave up her career as well… Read More

A German bomb demolishes a London Woolworth’s in 1944, and five of the victims are children.  The substance of this novel is what might have been for these kids, but the premise i… Read More

Maali is a 1980s war photographer in Sri Lanka with a box of incriminating hidden photos that he wants to come to light.  Unfortunately, Maali is dead.  He is now a spirit residing… Read More

I have resisted reading this book, because it was basically the “It” book of 2022.  Where the Crawdads Sing was the last “It” book that I read, and it did not li… Read More

This book definitely provided a learning experience, especially with regard to the origins and beliefs of Rastafari.  I did not previously know that the Rasta revered Haile Selassie, th… Read More

Molly is a hotel maid who seems to be on the autism spectrum.  She misinterprets other people’s emotions and sarcastic comments, and consequently she is a poor judge of character… Read More

Frida Liu has a “very bad day” and leaves her eighteen-month-old daughter home alone for two and a half hours.  As a result, she must spend a year at the School for Good Mot… Read More

Vacca Vale is a fictitious Indiana city that was once a thriving industrial metropolis.  Now it is dying, and developers plan to demolish a sizeable greenspace.  The title of the b… Read More

Whether or not I like an author depends a lot on which of their books I read first.  In the case of Elizabeth McCracken, I loved The Giant’s House, but if I had read Niagara Falls… Read More

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara t… Read More

Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friends… Read More

This book's political angle hits uncomfortably close to home.  The Crisis, a period of economic collapse, yielded way to a dystopian, fascist, xenophobic society with a Stepford tinge t… Read More

Utopia Avenue is the name of a very talented eclectic band assembled in England in the 1960s.  The backdrop of this musical era helps make this a nostalgia trip worth taking.  Grif… Read More

As ghost stories go, this one is not particularly gruesome or even scary, but it’s a good one nonetheless, and actually, it’s more of a haunted house story.  Every nine year… Read More

Jason Taylor is the smart, funny, and especially endearing first-person narrator of this gem, which takes place in a small English town in the 1980s.  Jason has a stammer, which is diff… Read More

Some authors have the talent to produce a novel, or at least a short novel, about a fairly unremarkable life.  Such is the case here.  Zorrie Underwood’s life begins with an… Read More

So many time travel novels are about someone falling in love with a time traveler.  Such is the case here as well.  Five people are transported from various times in the past to tw… Read More

Three siblings—Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan—happen upon a badly beaten and barely conscious boy in a field.  This discovery has a marked impact on each of them, as does the real… Read More

Mercury is the name of a very special horse—so special that Viv has sacrificed all of her ideals for this horse, which she does not even own.  Like Gone Girl, this novel contains… Read More

Whereas Normal People was about one on-again, off-again couple, two such couples inhabit this novel, which is largely epistolary.  Eileen and Simon, who live in Dublin, have known each… Read More

At first, the title character completely turned me off, with his five marriages and countless absurd failed business ventures.  I thought this book was going to turn out to be a farce… Read More

Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a New York law firm, suffers from bouts of the ultimate wanderlust.  When the urge to walk hits him, he can’t stop until he drops.  He eventually… Read More

Jews and Blacks live semi-harmoniously in this semi-voluminous cast of characters.  In fact, at times I had to remind myself who was Jewish and who was Black, and if I couldn’t re… Read More

This book needs a different title.  For one thing, it sounds like it’s about the family of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is to some degree, but… Read More

I may not be the target audience, which is probably women in their thirties, for this juicy novel, but I devoured it with relish.  Nina, the first-person narrator, is a successful autho… Read More

Fourteen-year-old Benny Oh and his mother, Annabelle, both have a problem with inanimate objects.  Since the death of Kenji, Benny’s father, Benny hears the voices of things like… Read More

Two trans women, Reese and Amy, fell in love, but then Reese cheated with married men, and Amy has detransitioned back to a man, because being a trans woman was just too difficult.  Now… Read More

I struggled with this book and don’t understand why it has received so many accolades.  I had a long career as a software developer, so the technology aspect did not turn me off… Read More

This book might be perfect for readers with a short attention span, but the format turned me off.  The first half of the book is a series of social media witticisms, and, if that’… Read More

This book makes me wish I had studied Physics.  If you’re a science nerd, don’t miss this blend of fact and fiction, but even if you’re not a science nerd, this book i… Read More

The author here is on a mission to prove that Ted Bundy and other serial killers are not genius masterminds.  In this novel, the Ted Bundy character is known simply as The Defendant, an… Read More

Historical fiction is not really my thing, and since I know that Maggie O’Farrell has a very fertile imagination, I would prefer that she stay away from semi-true stories.  I like… Read More

I love time-travel novels with their tricky handling of interference with the past.  In this one, the author has conjured up a unique world--a series of identical valleys with a twenty… Read More