This blisteringly intense novel is one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s a character portrait in gorgeous prose, has elements of magical realism and suspense thriller, and was impossible for me to put down once I’d started. (It’s short enough to read in one sitting.) So I’ll put off the plot description for a moment ( Read more... )

A little girl gets lost alone in the woods. But for better or worse, no one is ever really alone…

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered that when she was nine years old.

Sounds like Cujo, doesn’t it? Sometimes bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault, just the way of the world. ( Read more... )

Note: I critiqued this novel in manuscript; the finished version differs from the one I originally read. My review is of the rewritten novel, not the original.

“This is the real damage of addiction. It turns you into a bad metaphor for yourself.”

Amends is a satirical mainstream literary novel about an ill-conceived reality TV show about a ( Read more... )

I read this when it first came out; please correct and forgive inaccuracies of memory. (Appropriate to the story ( Read more... )

Rosemary once was a child in a family with a sister, Fern, and a brother, Lowell. Now she's in college, palling around with a manic pixie dream girl named Harlow and trying not to think about the mysterious event that caused Fern to vanish and Lowell's life to go off the rails. The novel switches between Rosemary's childhood and adulthood as she ( Read more... )

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo
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I read this because I loved Barker’s harrowing, gorgeously written, revelatory Regeneration trilogy, about shell-shocked soldiers in WWI. Having read Border Crossing… I highly recommend Regeneration.Tom Seymour, a psychologist, is walking along the river with his soon-to-be-ex-wife when a young man leaps into the river. Tom jumps in and saves his ( Read more... )

A young girl in a floating community off the Gulf Coast throws a message in a bottle into the ocean, and it makes its way across the world, to a political prisoner in solitary confinement on a platform suspended over a lake of fire ( Read more... )

This is one of my favorite books. My uncle gave me a copy when I was in high school, and I have re-read it every couple years, ever since.

Isherwood is better known for Berlin Stories, a semi-autobiographical work on pre-Nazi Germany which became the basis for Cabaret.

Prater Violet is a semi-autobiographical account of the young Isherwood was ( Read more... )

A noir mystery so well-written and cleverly structured that it overcame my usual dislike of reading about narcissistic hipster yuppies, not to mention my usual dislike of multiple plot elements which are too spoilery to mention ( Read more... )