Archive for the ‘NE & New York’ Category

CALEB’S CROSSING by Geraldine Brooks

What becomes of those who independently and courageously navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide cultures? Is it truly possible to make those crossings without relinquishing one’s very identity?

Geraldine Brooks poignantly explores these questions in her latest novel, CALEB’S CROSSING. The story is based on sketchy knowledge of the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk – the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College — and a member of the Wampanoag tribe in what is now Martha’s Vineyard.

May 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Class - Race - Gender, Facing History, NE & New York, y Award Winning Author

RUSSIAN WINTER by Daphne Kalotay

Daphne Kalotay imbues the crowd-pleasing qualities of commercial fiction with a soft and sensuous literary touch in this novel of exile and family, love and betrayal. From the Stalinist aggression of Russia to the peaceful, snowy streets of Boston, the reader is taken on a page-turning journey of professional ballet, fancy jewels, and ethereal poetry. This is an historical romance written by a scholar to appeal to readers seeking a satisfying escape. ??

April 25, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Debut Novel, Facing History, Mystery/Suspense, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Russia

SO MUCH PRETTY by Cara Hoffman

Imagine you are the “outsider” and reporter, Stacy Flynn. You came to this farm town in upstate New York via Cleveland to find the “big-picture” story on rural waste dumping here in off-the-grid Haeden. You’re twenty-four, alert as a cat, keen to pounce like a tiger, with Malcolm X glasses, a postmodern flair, and a Mencken regard. You’ve won an award in the big city, and now that the Rust Belt stories are waning, you seek the newly pelted. But after several years of living among wind-battered farmhouses, tall white flagpoles, crumbled colonials, and broken-down buses, you’re still waiting and suspicious of the omnipotent, industrialized local dairy farm while writing benign pieces about the latent, wall-eyed community….

April 11, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Class - Race - Gender, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Mystery/Suspense, NE & New York, Reading Guide

LOVE YOU MORE by Lisa Gardner

In Lisa Gardner’s Love You More, Tessa Leoni has a great deal on her plate. She has been a Massachusetts state trooper for four years and has a beautiful six-year-old daughter, Sophie, whose father’s name Tessa does not even know. Leoni has an inner toughness that she will desperately need as she faces an uncertain future. Her husband of three years and Sophie’s stepfather, Brian Darby, has been shot to death, and the evidence points to Tessa as the perpetrator. Worse, Tessa’s little girl, Sophie, has disappeared. The detectives soon suspect that not only did Tessa gun down her husband in cold blood, but that she also killed and buried her daughter.

March 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: NE & New York, Sleuths Series

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD by Rebecca Goldstein

With a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, Guggenheim and MacArthur (genius) awards, several novels, and non-fiction studies of Gödel and Spinoza under her belt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is nobody’s fool. But I can’t decide whether her decision to populate her latest novel exclusively with people like herself is good or bad. Set in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly at Harvard but mainly at another elite university which might be a fictionalized Brandeis, the entire cast of characters seems to consist of academic philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, or theologians, all determined to prove that they are smarter than anybody else.

February 20, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Contemporary, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Theme driven, Unique Narrative, y Award Winning Author

FRAGILE by Lisa Unger

FRAGILE is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

January 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Family Matters, Mystery/Suspense, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Theme driven