Archive for the ‘2011 Favorites’ Category

ELEGIES FOR THE BROKEN HEARTED by Christie Hodgen

The premise—we are shaped by our interactions with others—sounds like something from a school summer writing assignment and is almost too bland to be worked with. But if truly great writing creates marvels from almost nothing, then Christie Hodgen’s ELEGIES FOR THE BROKENHEARTED is one such wonder.

July 19, 2011 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Character Driven, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Family Matters, Literary

THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

July 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, France, Gothic, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense, Time Period Fiction

MISERY BAY by Steve Hamilton

After a wait of 5 years and 2 non-series books, including last year’s Edgar award winning THE LOCK ARTIST, Steve Hamilton has brought back Alex McKnight in MISERY BAY, the eighth book in this excellent series. While relaxing at the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan with the owner Jackie Connery and his friend Vinnie “Red Sky” LeBlanc, Alex’s evening is interrupted by a man he didn’t expect to ever see there, Chief Roy Maven, who surprisingly asks for Alex’s help. Chief Maven, the head of the nearby Sault Ste. Marie police force, wants Alex to help his old state trooper partner, Charles “Raz” Razniewski, determine why his son Charlie would hang himself in a remote part of Misery Bay, Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula part of Michigan.

July 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Sleuths Series, US Midwest

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND by Michel Houellebecq

It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with WAR AND PEACE just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND is a book that will be read for generations to come.

July 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Translated, Unique Narrative, World Literature

THE STORM AT THE DOOR by Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan Merrill Block has written a novel so irrepressibly beautiful and poetic that it left me stunned.THE STORM AT THE DOOR is based on the life of his grandparents, Frederick and Katharine. Partly imagined and partly based on fact, this is the story of a troubled family dealing with mental illness, secrets, and denial. It is also about the horror and the power of a psychiatric hospital, along with the myriad patients who have enacted their trust in this institution.

July 1, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Family Matters, Literary, Mental Health, NE & New York, Real People Fiction

THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR by Arthur Phillips

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author – Arthur Phillips’s ingenious faux-memoir – was to Google to see what was true and what wasn’t…only to find that much of Phillips’s traceable past has been erased.

Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he’s accomplished in this novel – er, memoir – is sheer genius.

June 24, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Alternate History, Contemporary, Identity