TINKERS by Paul Harding

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

May 27, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Award Winning Author, Contemporary, Debut Novel, End-of-Life, Identity, Literary, Nature, NE & New York, Pulitzer Prize

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot’s THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS is an enthralling look at the origin of HeLa cells that grew “with [such] mythological intensity,” that they “seemed unstoppable.” They were a “continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample” acquired from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cervical cancer complicated by syphilis…Neither she nor her family had any idea that the cells obtained from her cervix in 1951 would eventually number in the trillions and become a vital part of medical research all over the world.

December 21, 2010 · Judi Clark · 2 Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Morality, Non-fiction, US South

DANIEL by Henning Mankell

Book Quote: “I’m a little boy, he thought. I have travelled much too far away. My parents and the other people I lived with are dead. And yet they live. They are still closer to me than the man called Father and the woman who doesn’t dare come close enough for me to grab her. […]

December 15, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Africa, Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Sweden, Translated, World Literature

EVERYTHING LOVELY, EFFORTLESS, SAFE by Jenny Hollowell

For the longest time, growing up in rural Virginia, Birdie Baker is convinced she is destined to follow the path set forth by her devout Christian parents. Like them, as a Jehovah’s Witness, she will spread the word of the Lord, marry, settle down and wrap it up. But the sense of unease that plagues her even after she is married to a church-going man named Judah, is worsened when she runs into her high school drama teacher at the grocery store. “What are you still doing here?” he asks, “I figured the next time I saw you it would be in a movie.” Eventually, leave Virgina she does. Birdie pools all her savings toward a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles.

December 14, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, California, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Drift-of-Life, guilt, Job, Life Choices

THE EVOLUTIONARY VOID by Peter F. Hamilton

In the final volume of Peter F. Hamilton’s VOID trilogy, we once again find Edeard trying to make things right in Makkathran, his city on Querencia, a planet in the Void.

December 4, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Speculative (Beyond Reality)

THE GIRL WITH THE GLASS FEET by Ali Shaw

In the snow-encrusted archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land, moth-winged bulls and a creature that can turn things white with her gaze share an island with more human lives: people who lose love as quickly as they gain it and who must struggle with the baggage of the past.

November 1, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Allegory/Fable, Contemporary, Debut Novel, Losses, Real Event Fiction, Small Town, Speculative (Beyond Reality), United Kingdom