Despite frequent warnings from English professors to never conflate the author with the narrator, the situations in which readers may actually make that mistake seldom seem to crop up. But beware Louise Wareham Leonard's 52 Men. It's all too easy to mistake author Louise for narrator Elise, and vice versa. In its opening, 52 Men … Continue reading 52 Men: A Review
I am a runner in only the loosest sense of the word. Occasionally, I fire up my Couch to 5K app and nurse dreams of becoming the next winner of the Boston Marathon. But mostly I realize how much I hate running and how much I enjoy having something like Haruki Murakami's What I Talk … Continue reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Review
For writers who need to back fateful encounters with reason, cyclical evils hold strong allure. It's easy when you make the Big Bad come knocking every 10, 20, or 250 years: you just have to stage your heroes correctly to make plot events look preordained. Any trope --- especially a common one --- can be … Continue reading Slade House: A Review
Reading college advice guides is a lot like looking at those pictures where they overlap the faces of the 25 hottest stars to show you what beauty is. You can pick out an ear here, an eyelash there, but you realize they're almost all exactly the same. The Professor Is in: The Essential Guide to … Continue reading The Professor Is In: A Review
It starts out on a happy note. A chef meets the woman of his dreams, and together they start a family. Although the gilt rubs off the novel pretty quickly, these early scenes set the tone for the rest of J. Ryan Stradal's Kitchens of the Great Midwest. Each chapter of Stradal's debut focuses on … Continue reading Kitchens of the Great Midwest: A Review