Fiction Books
Digging to America
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Two families arrive at the Baltimore airport, each to meet their newly adopted infants from Korea. One boisterous family has come with friends, balloons, video cameras, microphones and tape recorders, gifts, and nametags.
Bone China
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It was strange reading this just two months after Pharmakon, because the two books are really quite similar, despite taking place in different countries. Both are primarily about family relationships,
As Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me
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Many literary fiction readers undoubtedly missed out on this book due to the unwieldy chick-lit like title and the equally misleading cover art. In addition there are some serious problems with the beginning of the novel.
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
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Through the trees they came, pawing at the snow to uncover the moss and leaves, eating any low-growing twigs and chewing the bark. Gretel caught her breath but didn’t move or speak. Telek took her hand,
The Help
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Set in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, this novel lays bare the dynamics underlying the lives of white women and the black maids who take care of them and their families. While the white women of the Junior League hold a bake sale to help The Poor Starving Children of Africa,
Lavinia
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Rome has not yet been founded; it doesn’t even have a name but is referred to at times as the village of Seven Hills, where only a few farmers and shepherds live. To the southwest, on the coast, lives Lavinia,
Zel
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This young adult retelling of the classic fairy tale Rapunzel follows the familiar storyline—a witch, a tower, a rope of hair, impassioned jealousy, a lover—but the tale is expanded and given great depth. It is set in Switzerland in the mid-1500s and reads like first-rate historical fiction, as though it’s an account from our shared history that really did happen, and this version has only been slightly fictionalized.
People of the Book
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Geraldine Brooks is an exceptional writer of nonfiction (Nine Parts of Desire was shortlisted for a Gustine in 2008) and fiction set in the past (Year of Wonders, set during England’s 1666 plague, is one of the best plague novels ever written), but apparently she cannot write fiction set in the present. This fact is made very clear in People of the Book, a novel in which the chapters alternate between past and present.
To Siberia
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The unnamed narrator in this book dreams of moving to Siberia when she grows up. She has read all about it, has studied photographs of it, and at the age of nine knows—and practices pronouncing—the names of all the cities
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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This book is narrated by an autistic boy who discovers his neighbor’s dog has been murdered. As he sets out to find the the killer, he uncovers the painful truth behind the loss of his mother.