Recent Reviews

As with Gary Shteyngart’s other novels, Lake Success features protagonists you love to hate. Hedge-fund manager and antique watch collector, Barry throws his credit cards in a trashcan and leaves wife Seema and autistic son for a roadtrip on a Greyhound bus in hopes of finding his high school sweetheart, Layla, and his true self. Equally caught up in self-loathing, Seema has an affair with a friend’s husband and chastises herself for her neglect of her son. Though they live as part of the nation’s economic 1 percent, their meager yet earnest attempts to connect are embarrassingly universal. That the primary action takes place in the last few months of Trump’s bid for the Presidency seems just about perfect. Recommended by Kelly Barth.

Fanny Says by Nicole Brown is a poetic love story to a Southern grandmother--not the one you're thinking, but one in a white caddie who smokes, drinks, and calls her grandchildren "little f**kers" as a term of endearment. But love--this grandmother and this granddaughter knew it. These poems will sting and soothe. Soak them up like a julip.

Recommended by Kelly Barth

Set in the same dilapidated house, Kingsolver’s alternating narratives represent an ambitious and deeply satisfying contemplation of how various characters meet this most basic need for a physical and spiritual dwelling. Though their lives are separated by more than a century, each person faces a difficult choice: Shelter in the security of old ideas or move into the unknown with new scientific understanding as their guide. By embracing their blossoming friendship forged by Darwin’s myth-shattering understanding of evolution, neighbors Thatcher Greenwood and Mary Treat, face the destruction of relationships, livelihoods, and small-town reputations. Present-day characters, Willa, Zeke, and Tig Knox grapple with their own proper response to a suicide, a crumbling inheritance, economic uncertainty, and a future of unraveling climate norms and all the challenges these represent for grandson, Dusty. Unsheltered is a timely, necessary, and soulfully reassuring book. Review by Kelly Barth.

Just before the onset of the Korean War, a mother and father leave Korea for America, bringing one young daughter with them, but leaving the other behind with relatives in the hope to someday return for her.  In alternating chapters, the two very different lives of Miran and Inja unfold with love, war, and rock-and-roll. But when Inja finally arrives in America, will she be meeting her true family at last or leaving her family in Korea forever?  Inspired by the author’s family history, The Kinship of Secrets is a powerful story of the everlasting bond between two sisters. Review by Mary Wahlmeier