The Stolen Child is a beautiful story of regret, forgiveness, and the pursuit of dreams.
The Emotional Depth of Historical Fiction in Ann Hood’s The Stolen Child
Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club: A Novel of Women’s Lives during the Red Scare
This novel is set in a time not yet popularized in historical novels. Kate Quinn, best known for her World War II novels, The Alice Network, The Rose Code and The Huntress, ventures into the McCarthy years in this intriguing novel. It is the time of the Red Scare, when people are losing jobs, fear for their safety, and face loss of reputation for their ideas and associations.
A Dual Narrative Journey
There were many projects developed for young artists to keep them going under during the Depression. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) and the Federal Art Project (FAP) were created to keep struggling artists working. Artists that eventually came into their own such as Jackson Pollack, Willem DeKooning, Mark Rothko, and Dorothea Lange were kept afloat during this period. They were charged with creating work for public spaces. In this story, a young woman artist entered a contest to paint a mural for her local post office in New Jersey but need meant shifts and she was sent to a town she’d never heard of—Edenton, North Carolina—to paint their post office mural.
The Complex Dynamics of Friendship
A truth that none of us think much about (or we’d go crazy) is how precarious our lives are or how they could be upended without warning. A tragedy and its blowback on everyone involved is the through line of this beautifully wrought book.
The Pearl Thief by Fiona McIntosh
There have been many novels recently written about the Holocaust—its devastation, its unimaginable cruelty, its heroes, its far-reaching effects into the future. And unfortunately, many of the tropes of those times resonate in our world right now. I try not to read them. Family members who survived are each heroes to me in their own way and their lives were forever shaped by what they experienced. In its way, this novel demonstrates this.
A Tale of Immigrant Resilience
Newly released this week, this novel is a throwback to the kind of novel that made me an avid reader. It’s a Barbara Taylor Bradford Woman of Substance kind of book. The undaunted heroine rises from meager circumstances. With talent, grit, and ambition, she faces many obstacles but becomes successful and climbs the rungs of society. This is not a criticism. It is a reflection of the circumstances in the early twentieth century and Maisie McIntyre is such a character.
The Long Reach into the Past
The narrative explores the haunting legacy of the Holocaust through Anne Berest's discovery of an ancestral postcard, initiating her search for family history. The text reflects on personal trauma, societal complicity in atrocities, and contemporary parallels of inhumanity, urging remembrance to prevent repeating the past while confronting present-day prejudices.
Laila Lalami’s Dream Hotel: A Cautionary Tale
Sara Hussein is a woman whose life requires juggling multiple balls. She is an archivist, a mother of toddler twins, and is for the most part happily married. She had been having trouble sleeping. A working mother with twin babies. Who wouldn't welcome a harmless device to help deepen the little sleep she was getting. It was a no brainer and decided to have a device implanted that promised to improve and deepen her sleep. Dreamscape, a tech company, marketed this as a sleep aid but is, in fact, sharing its data. No one was more surprised than Sara.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Latest Novel: A Dream Count Unpacked
In this latest novel by Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, she explores the idea of dream count, a backwards look at the past in the hope of arriving at a better future. If the past is filled with so much unrealized potential, how can the failed affairs of old be transformed?
Everything We Never Had, A Story of Fathers and Sons
This beautifully crafted novel was written for a young adult audience but I would recommend it for teens and adults alike.Long listed for the National Book Award it is the tale of four generations of Filipino Americans grappling with identity, past trauma and the long reach it has into the future.
