THIS IS EXACTLY LIKE YOU by Drew Perry

Jack Lang is not great at being in the world. At the start of this quirky and original book, he has impulsively purchased a second ranch house – right across the street from his original house – at an auction. His wife Beth, a teacher at a local college, his just left him for his good friend Terry Canavan. Terry’s long-time girlfriend, Rena, may or may not be coming on to him.

To really complicate things, he is left in charge of his autistic savant son Hendrick, who has a penchant for memorizing the Weather Channel and mimicking advertising (in its entirety) and sloganeering verbatim.

And that’s just the start of things.

July 11, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Humorous, Reading Guide, US South

PRIVATE LIFE by Jane Smiley

After I read Jane Smiley’s non-fiction 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL, I valued her choices as a writer who takes enterprising risks, who jiggles out of her comfort zone or creates a wider berth within her artistic province. She retains some of her fixtures–horses, solipsistic academicians, and thwarted women–as she creates this period piece of wedded UN-bliss. In this latest, a novel of a marriage during fin de siecle America, Private Life spans from Missouri to the California Naval Observatory in Villejo, California, from the end of American Victorianism to the Japanese internment of 1942.

June 25, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: California, Facing History, Family Matters, Reading Guide, US Midwest, y Award Winning Author

THE LOVERS by Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida’s relatively short novel, THE LOVERS, packs a big wallop. It is a multi-layered story about Yvonne, a widow, who returns to Turkey where she and her husband once honeymooned. She believes that by returning to the same place where they had been together early in her marriage, she will feel closer to him. Her husband Peter was recently killed in a hit and run car accident in their hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Yvonne has rented a large home, sight unseen, for a couple of weeks until she is scheduled to meet up with her son and daughter and their partners on a boating trip.

June 24, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Turkey, y Award Winning Author

HUSBAND AND WIFE by Leah Steward

The first person narrator of Leah Stewart’s Husband and Wife is thirty-five year old Sarah Price, who has been married to Nathan Bennett, a fiction writer, for four years. They are the doting parents of an incredibly precocious three-year-old girl, Mattie, and a baby boy. Sarah, who was once a promising poet, is now a busy mother who has a full-time job as a business manager for the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University. She is perpetually worn-out, but considers herself to be relatively fulfilled. One day, Nathan throws a monkey-wrench into their relationship when he confesses that his new book, Infidelity, is not completely fictional. Nathan morosely admits, “I cheated on you.”

June 17, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Reading Guide, US Mid-Atlantic

UNFORGIVABLE by Philippe Djian

UNFORGIVABLE is narrated by 60-year-old Francis, a famous author who’s beginning to look like a has-been. His latest novel is going nowhere and his much younger wife, real-estate agent Judith is growing increasingly distant. These troubling elements in Francis’s life are superceded, however, by the disappearance of his daughter Alice.

April 24, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, France, Translated, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

LOST by Alice Lichtenstein

LOST, by Alice Lichtenstein, is a beautiful, literary and profoundly poetic novel. It will appeal to anyone who has ever known or loved a person with Alzheimer’s or has lost someone they loved. The descriptions of loss and grief are profound and the book keeps on getting better with each page.

March 10, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Contemporary, Family Matters, NE & New York, Reading Guide