Archive for January, 2011

THE WEIRD SISTERS by Eleanor Brown

The thorny relationship between sisters has offered a mother lode of material for writers dating back to the start of time. Shakespeare tackled it in King Lear; in modern times, authors that vary from Louisa May Alcott to Julia Glass and Jane Smiley have put their personal spin on this theme.

Now debut author Eleanor Brown takes her turn. Meet Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia, three sisters named for Shakespearean heroines by their eccentric and professorial father. These are women who look very much alike, maintain a common family bond, but if truth be told, don’t like each other very much.

January 20, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Unique Narrative

THE GIRL IN THE GREEN RAINCOAT by Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman’s THE GIRL IN THE GREEN RAINCOAT is a takeoff on REAR WINDOW, the film in which Jimmy Stewart, who is laid up and bored, eavesdrops on his neighbors. Thirty-five year old Tess Monaghan, private investigator, is pregnant and on forced bed rest. Although her boyfriend, Crow, has been patient and accommodating with his irritable partner, Tess is restless and annoyed that she cannot go about her business, which includes conducting surveillance, enjoying alcoholic beverages, and eating her favorite junk foods. She decides to use binoculars to help her do some sleuthing. On a number of occasions, Tess has observed a girl wearing a green raincoat walking her Italian greyhound. Suddenly, the girl disappears, and Tess observes the dog running around by himself, his leash dangling.

January 19, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Humorous, Reading Guide, Sleuths Series, US Mid-Atlantic, y Award Winning Author

CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann’s CARIBOU ISLAND. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. Like Shreve, his characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this “exclave” state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.

January 18, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Alaska, Character Driven, Contemporary, Family Matters, Reading Guide, Wild West

CARIBOU ISLAND by David Vann

Many people think of Alaska as wildness with great open spaces in a mountainous wildernous with sub-arctic cold, dark and long winters, ever-light summers, bears and moose. This is not the Alaska of David Vann. His Alaska consists of what sounds like an area most likely the Tongass National Rain Forest. This is the northernmost rainforest on earth, and it extends into southeast Alaska. Trees here are huge but grow close together here much like in the Amazon. It rains up to 400 inches a year in this part of Alaska and the days are often dark and dismal with damp that cuts right through you. There is no vista in this forest; all you have are the trees that hem you in.

January 18, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Alaska, Character Driven, Contemporary, Literary

GIVE ME YOUR HEART by Joyce Carol Oates

GIVE ME YOUR HEART, the newest collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, shimmers with violence, actual or imagined. Reading these stories is like hearing footsteps in your home when you know you’re the only one there. They’re like seeing something impossible out of the corner of your eye and being sure that you’ve seen it no matter what your rational self tells you. The stories make your heart race and your eyes open wide in horror. They do not come to us gently. Joyce Carol Oates grabs the reader and pulls him into her unique vision where fear, panic, tension, death, love and murder prevail, often simultaneously. These are horror stories without any element of the super-natural. She’s the real McCoy of this genre.

January 17, 2011 · Judi Clark · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Horror, Psychological Suspense, Short Stories, y Award Winning Author

THE BEST AMERICAN NOIR OF THE CENTURY edited by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy

At almost 800 pages and around $20 the anthology THE BEST AMERICAN NOIR OF THE CENTURY is guaranteed to please noir fans. The book is the no-brainer choice for anyone interested in crime fiction, but even more than that, anyone even remotely curious about the delineations under the umbrella term “crime fiction” must read Otto Penzler’s inspired introduction. As a reader of crime and noir fiction, there’s nothing more annoying than to see the word “noir” bandied about; its misuse threatens to render the term meaningless, so here’s Otto Penzler on this “prodigiously overused term” to set the record straight.

January 16, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Noir, Short Stories