Have you ever wondered how the mind of someone different from you works and what the person might be thinking and feeling? That is exactly the insight that Eli Gottlieb provides when he gives you a glimpse into the mind of an autistic man, Todd Aaron, in “Best Boy.”
We first meet Todd
I just finished reading Bill Clegg’s “Did You Ever Have A Family”, a novel about loss, grief, regret and sorrow. It revolves around June Reid and the death of four people in a house explosion and the subsequent impact on the lives of their surviving families and the people they touched. It does not
In Laura Groff’s “Fates and Furies”, beginnings and endings combine in a character rich story about life, love and loss. Lancelot Satterwhite (Lotto), is born into a loving and wealthy family in sunny Florida, tied to his religiously zealous mother and his kind, mild mannered father. Lotto “would have been bright, ordinary if his
Margaret Atwood’s latest, “The Heart Goes Last”, is so funny, and so scary at the same time that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was done. At the start, we meet Stan and Charmaine, a recently married, once happy couple, now destitute, and living in their car. The backdrop is
“My Name is Lucy Barton” is a deceptively simple book that on first blush might seem to be about a relationship between a daughter and mother. Lucy is telling her story looking back over a nine-week period she spent in the hospital recovering from complications after removal of her appendix. While she is recovering,
I just finished Colum McCann’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking” and it is simply the antithesis of the last two books I reviewed (Purity and City on Fire). And that’s a good thing–in case you were wondering. None of the clutter or pretension. Simply beautiful writing, moving story telling and believable, recognizable
I finished City on Fire a couple of weeks ago and just couldn’t decide whether I liked it and what I wanted to say about it. The book has its highs and its lows, but overall I have decided it is overly ambitious, tries too hard and is simply too long.
A first novel, City
![51P5bUSPVFL._SX340_BO1,204,203,200_[1]](https://www.frombriefstobooks.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/883/2015/09/51P5bUSPVFL._SX340_BO1204203200_1-206x300.jpg)
“There’s a fashion now for fat, hyper-intellectual, cooler-than-thou novels that are loaded with lard and siphoned of believable feeling…” This is how Mary Karr, the poet and memoirist, has described today’s novel and this is how I felt about Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity”.
I loved “The Corrections”, and I always look forward to and read the