The Street Sweeper reminds me, organizationally, of looking at the back of a piece of embroidery. There are plots and story-lines running everywhere, and at first it feels chaotic. However, by the end, you are looking in awe at a beautifully-finished piece of story-telling. This is an awesome book, well worth the time commitment required…
Category Archives: Literary
The Flight of Gemma Hardy: Review
The Flight of Gemma Hardy is a resetting of Jane Eyre into 1960s Britain, but it’s not a slavish retelling. Author Margot Livesey takes the basic plot outline and reimagines it, changing some things but preserving main events and, most importantly, Jane’s fearlessness, impudence when necessary, and flair for surviving difficult circumstances with tenacity and…
The Invisible Ones
Ray Lovell wakes up in a hospital bed, half-paralyzed, barely able to speak, and delusional to boot. Fragmentary memories haunt him. Tests show he’s been poisoned, but by whom and when? As his memory begins to return, he knows he was hired by a Romany (formerly called Gypsy) man to find his daughter, Rose Janko,…
The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer for Middlesex, and 9 years later, he’s back with The Marriage Plot, a character-driven novel with fully fleshed out, if not always likeable, characters. Madeleine Hannah is a pretty English major, about to graduate from Brown, who wrote her senior thesis on the marriage plot that was central in novels…
The Woman who Heard Color
The Woman Who Heard Color opens with Laurel, an “art detective” who tracks down artwork missing or stolen, especially under the Nazi regime, meeting with Isabella, a German immigrant whose father was Jewish and whose mother, Laurel suspects, worked with Hitler and his minions to steal artwork from Jewish owners and galleries. Isabella is elderly…
The Little Bride
Life on the prairie was romanticized by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Janette Oke. Yes, there were dangerous Indians and hard winters, but the focus was the love of family and the persevering pioneering spirit. Anna Solomon presents a quite different look at the Dakota frontier in her novel The Little Bride. The novel opens in…
In Malice Quite Close
In Malice, Quite Close is the kind of book that gets into your head and lingers there. It’s got a gripping plot and it’s really well-written, so that it pulls you in. Don’t get into the trap of reading too fast though. This is a book to read slowly, enjoying the descriptions of houses and…
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Jennifer Donovan
Managing Editor
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