SING THEM HOME by Stephanie Kallos

This is a saga, a sweeping family story that lodges in your marrow, the kind of story that makes you smile, laugh, weep, snort, chortle, sing, spread your arms wide and lay your heart wide open.

With flavors tender, ribald, ironical, farcical, tragic, magical, and wondrous, Sing Them Home narrates an epic story of a family emotionally disrupted by the disappearance of their mother (and wife), Hope, in a Nebraska tornado of 1978. Hope was swept up, along with her Singer sewing machine and a Steinway piano, but she never came down. Due to the absence of her remains, all that stands in the graveyard is her cenotaph.

March 27, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Contemporary, Family Matters, Literary, Reading Guide, US Midwest

THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT by Carol Edgarian

THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT by Carol Edgarian is the story of a marriage. The novel takes place in the not far distant past, when Obama has recently been elected president and the markets have plummeted. Lena and Charlie have started their lives anew. Charlie was the head of surgery at Mass General Hospital. He has left this behind to move to San Francisco to start up a new company that specializes in medical robotics although this is not the best time to look for venture capitalists to fund his research.

March 23, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: California, Character Driven, Contemporary

CATCH ME WHEN I FALL by Patricia Westerhof

Whenever she doubts her role as “just a housewife,” Vicky recalls Oma, giving her the above advice. Oma had escaped to Canada from Holland in January 1945 with Vicky’s father and her other four children with nothing but the clothes they wore, the family Bible and a piece of paper giving the name of somebody to contact. Now, Vicky wants to make good by bringing her Alzheimer suffering father into her home.

March 16, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Family Matters, Short Stories

THE INTIMATES by Ralph Sassone

Robbie and Maize, the principal characters in Ralph Sassone’s immensely readable debut novel, THE INTIMATES, totally fit the profile of these restless and searching young adults. As the book opens, the two are still in high school; Maize nurses a crush on her guidance counselor and when Robbie’s path crosses hers, it doesn’t immediately amount to much. Robbie is gay—a fact he doesn’t realize until much later in high school.

February 21, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Debut Novel, New York City

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

THE POISON TREE by Erin Kelly

THE POISON TREE, the debut novel from British author Erin Kelly, begins with a young woman named Karen driving her child, nine-year-old Alice to pick up husband Rex. This may sound like a fairly routine domestic errand, but the difference here is that Rex has just been released from prison after serving 10 years for murder. The novel’s first chapter is a window into the delicacy of a fractured family’s difficult reunion as parenting roles shift to a thinly structured “normalcy.” The underlying question is why was Rex in prison for murder? Just what happened to put Rex behind bars is slowly doled out to the reader as first-person narrator Karen goes back to the mid 90s when she was a university student at Queen Charlotte’s College and met the intriguing, free-spirit, budding actress Biba and her brother Rex.

January 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense, Reading Guide, United Kingdom