Fen, a debut short story collection by Daisy Johnson, is captivating. While the characters and stories are not formally connected, meaning the characters from one story don’t know the characters from another, they are all set in the marshy Fenland region of eastern England. The local pub, the Fox and Hound, is visited by characters
Exes is a debut novel told in inter-connected stories all (mostly) set in Providence, RI. The first story introduces us to Clay Blackall, a man who is emotionally lost and directionless, seemingly unable to cope with the death of his brother. Each story has a new narrator, but in between these stories are sections that
The Redemption of Galen Pike is a collection of flawless short stories and flash fiction. Setting, character, and plot are of such a variety that the strongest similarity between the stories is that each is more surprising than the last. Davies deftly turns every situation, and the world, on its side. In surprisingly few pages, Davies
One of the Boys is a heartbreaking debut novel about two boys and their father, starting a new life in Albuquerque. At first, I thought maybe, just maybe, it was a good thing these boys were no longer with their mother, whom they all claim to hate. Their father, a dreamer (narcissist?), says they’ll have
Memoirs as graphic novels, such as Persepolis, Fun Home, or the March trilogy, is a genre I find fascinating and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is definitely in keeping with that trend. This is a book that is beautiful both in story and appearance. Bui’s illustrations are in muted tones of black, white,
The newest novel from Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train, is A Piece of the World, a fictional biography of Andrew Wyeth’s most famous subject. Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World depicts his neighbor, Anna Christina Olson. While much is known about this woman in connection to Wyeth, Kline fills in the gaps in our knowledge