The Snow Child

The Snow Child

Rating:  The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Little, Brown and Company (2012), 386 pages. 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...
The Way the Crow Flies

The Way the Crow Flies

  (This review first appeared in June 2005) Rating:  The Way the Crow Flies, by Ann-Marie MacDonald.  HarperCollins (2003), 820 pages. This book perfectly displays what I mean when I write that an author has flawlessly captured the child’s voice in his or...
The Glimmer Palace

The Glimmer Palace

Rating:  The Glimmer Palace, by Beatrice Colin.  Riverhead Books (2008), 414 pages. This novel takes place in cabaret-era Berlin and involves the birth of cinema—two topics that, for no good reason at all, I find strangely dull and uneventful.  But since I...