Food is, of course, the perfect metaphor for Walsh’s life: through much stumbling, there is a persistent desire to find the right dish, the perfect spice, the ingredient that brings it all together. Read More
Meet Julie Thatch, the teenage protagonist of Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel, The Dream of Doctor Bantam. Julie is seventeen, an...
In The Raven’s Heart Jesse Blackadder transports you back to Scotland, 1561, and the royal court of Mary, Queen of...
The Galaxie and Other Rides is a collection about class and family and cars. It covers a host of hot-button issues: drugs, addiction, teen moms, HIV, war, the dying automotive industry, prostitution. Sigler manages to make her characters heartfelt and believable, even when their actions might render them irredeemable... Read More
This is no bucolic childhood. Sina Queyras’s Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books) is a novel about grief, about anger, about familial obligation and madness and conflict. It is an internal, abstracted construction of family. Read More
Wingshooters is constantly hinting at, without overtly stating—and this is nicely done—the shifting social and cultural mores of rural America in the mid-1970s. Read More
In the opening scene of Marianne Banks’ first novel, Growing Up Delicious (Bella), the protagonist, Jennifer Andersen, admits something we’ve all felt one time or another: “The problem was I looked grown up but felt twelve years old." Read More
Amelia Earhart, America’s beloved and iconic aviatrix, who disappeared over the South Pacific in 1937, remains a mysterious figure in...
In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade, who won a Lambda for her memoir Wishbone, considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue. With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her past—to skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond. Read More
The opening chapter of The Girls Club (Bywater Books) by Sally Bellerose lays it all out on the table. But...
