Finally: a story about animals that won't leave you in a puddle, heart-broken, swearing off all other animal stories for life. (I won't name them here, because including them in this context is truly spoilerific, but you know the stories I'm referring to. We probably cried in all the same
I first posted about Robert Hough's novel in a whirl, having read Dr. Brinkley's Tower in less than 24 hours, falling fast and fully into the story. I avoided specifics about the plot and the characters, because the wonder of this novel is rooted in the telling. House of Anansi,
One might think that writers of bookish books would go on and on, produce vast treatises on their love of books and literature, but many bookish books are slim volumes. Consider Carlos Maria Dominguez's The House of Paper (2004), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976; Trans.
It's legendary now, that Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel was rejected by numerous publishers and eventually even its agent handed the book back to its author. It was "too different", different because it credited young readers with being able to grapple with the concept of evil, and because it
In which I chat about reading Dr. Brinkley's Tower in a single day. (You can't build a tower that quickly, but you can read about it.) Admittedly, I shuffled this volume amongst my stack of current reads for weeks before I started reading. (There is always a book in there that
