Angie Adbou handles multiple narrative voices very well. Readers familiar with her earlier novels, The Bone Cage (2008) and The Canterbury Trail (2011) will know this, having inhabited narratives from varying perspectives. They will also know (as will readers of her 2006 collection of short stories, Anything Boys Can Do) that
Ater a year of new-new-new, January has been filled with the familiar, the known. It's not been about making new-shiny-library-residing friends, but about becoming better acquainted with long-time residents of my own bookshelves, remembering what drew particular authors onto my MRE (MustReadEverything) list and particular books onto my shelves. Have
As much as these stories focus on solitary characters who observe, from the margins, they long for something else; Walt and Mr. Jones are ultimately preoccupied with relationships. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Margaret Sweatman's Mr. Jones openly confronts duplicity. "His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d
In discussing the different kinds of love which the Vietnamese language distinguishes between, Kim Thúy's Ru lists thích, which means "to love by taste". Random House Canada, 2014 (One may also love without being in love (thuong), love passionately (yêu), love ecstatically (mê), love blindly (mù quáng), or love gratefully (tình nghīa)
Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed and Maurice Mierau's Detachment: An Adoption Memoir are a perfect pair. Penguin Random House, 2014 And the Mountains Echoed begins with a story, told by a father to his son and his daughter. "Father never felt more present to Abdullah, more vibrant, revealed,
