Fiction Books
A Tale for the Time Being
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Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was a finalist for the 2013 Booker prize. It has been praised in over thirty reviews from major newspapers and magazines as “masterful,” “exquisite,” “dazzling,” “harrowing,” etc. Readers who regularly scan the blurbs in the front pages of a paperback know not to take this sort of adulation seriously though. Lavishly extravagant adjectives have become so de rigueur in publishing that they are essentially meaningless.
Stargazing Dog
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Stargazing Dog was first published in Japan in 2008, where it has sold over a half million copies. It’s a relatively short graphic novel that should take about a half hour to read, except that I had to take numerous breaks from reading to cry. Do not read this in a public setting.
The Murder of the Century
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Nostalgia for the past, this book reminds me, is almost always for an imagined past. When I think of how publishing and news “used to be,” I imagine somber, serious, reliable news.
Gone Girl
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Flynn is a writer in the mystery and crime genres—two categories I almost never read. Her latest book, however, was described as a psychological portrait of a marriage—a plot I almost always want to read if it is done well. The usual superlatives: “brilliant,”
Dog Boy
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Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung. Viking (2010), 288 pages.
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
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Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages.
Throw This Book Away
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Citrus County
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Reviewed by Donna
I happened to read this book immediately following The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, although they were published two years apart. They are interestingly similar: both are psychological suspense, both are told from the point of view of middle schoolers, and both are creepy as hell in similar ways.
The Snow Child
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Easily the best book I’ve read in the last fourteen months. It has everything: Russian fairy tales, pioneer homesteaders, a lost child, a red fox, Alaskan wilderness, an orphan, and lots of snow and ice.
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden
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Back-cover reviews describe this as “atmospheric” and a “modern fairy tale,” words that fail to convey that the last quarter of the book is actually a bona fide horror story. True, there are many enjoyable “atmospheric” elements: