Archive for the ‘Theme driven’ Category

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: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Theme driven, Unique Narrative, y Award Winning Author

THE WAY HOME by George Pelecanos

THE WAY HOME begins with Chris Flynn doing time in the juvenile rehabilitation centre at Pine Ridge, Maryland “about twenty-five miles from Northwest D.C.” The first section of the novel concentrates on Chris’s life at Pine Ridge and the relationships he forges with the other juvenile offenders. As the only white inmate, he’s known somewhat predictably as “white boy.” It’s a term he’s grown used to and a term he doesn’t take personally. Most of the other inmates can’t understand what Chris is doing there; they see him as an idiot for jeopardizing the advantages he has: loving, caring parents, a home, and a dog.

January 22, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Contemporary, Family Matters, Mystery/Suspense, Theme driven

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: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Family Matters, Mystery/Suspense, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Theme driven

IN A STRANGE ROOM by Damon Galgut

I’d heard a lot of buzz about IN A STRANGE ROOM, one of the titles shortlisted for the 2010 Booker prize, but since I tend to react negatively to waves of publicity, as the uniform praise for this book climbed, my interest plummeted. I almost didn’t review South African author Damon Galgut’s book IN A STRANGE ROOM, but I changed my mind, and as it turns out IN A STRANGE ROOM is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

IN A STRANGE ROOM isn’t an easy book to review. It’s divided into three distinct sections, and it’s possible, I think, to write the review in several different ways. After chewing over the plot now for several weeks, I’d argue that in this extraordinary novel, Galgut uses travel as a way of exploring two heavily nuanced relationships, and at the same time, parallels are drawn between journeys taken and relationships endured.

January 1, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Literary, Theme driven, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

OLD BORDER ROAD by Susan Froderberg

Dozens of books have promised the sentiment “for lovers of Cormac McCarthy” and left me sorely disappointed. But, in this claim, Froderberg is truly McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir, if not yet fully capturing his linguistic sublimity and lethal, graveyard humor. In this ambitious debut novel, the author explores desperate and broken souls living through a drought in southern Arizona—a land of sand and scrub, cactus stands, spiny shrubs, bitterbrush, dusty maiden, diamondbacks, rodeos, distant foothills, punishing climate, and an endless starlit sky.

December 9, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Theme driven, US Southwest, Wild West

GREAT HOUSE by Nicole Krauss

An imposing wooden desk with nineteen drawers floats through this book like a buoy, and sometimes with shackles, loosely uniting four disparate but interconnected narrative threads. The desk is largely a monument to Jewish survival, loss, and recovery, and mirrors the dissolution, pain, and dire hope of each character. Additionally, it is a covetous object, given a poignant and existential significance by the chorus of voices that are bound to it by their memories.

October 6, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Facing History, Literary, National Book Award Winner, Theme driven, Unique Narrative