As we launch head-first into the busy holiday season, two family mysteries begin our week. The ever-popular Jodi Picoult is back with another title that mixes animal behavior and human drama. (I say “another” given 2012’s Lone Wolf, which we recommended here.) Leaving Time focuses on elephant research and a mother’s disappearance. Diane Chamberlain is […]
Today I review two books that have the potential to be wildly popular with teens–and wildly challenging for school librarians. Caitlin Moran and Lena Dunham are media forces, women who excel in professions dominated by men. They both succeed through the sheer force of their personalities, and to some extent through their willingness to say […]
All We Had is a road trip novel that follows a mother and daughter from Los Angeles to the East Coast. In Lucky Us, a family moves from Ohio to Hollywood, then back East to New York. There are two main appeal elements in these road novels. All We Had exemplifies the first–grappling to survive and […]
It’s the end of August, and we still have quite a few reviews of summer books to share with you. So don’t let this somewhat clumsy grouping at all diminish your regard for the following three debut novels. I start with 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas because, well, great title! And it really does […]
Today’s books are about family, relationships, secrets, and coming-of-age. Both move back and forth in time, and include characters suffering from mental illness. Sarah Cornwell‘s debut novel, What I Had Before I Had You follows a mother’s memories back into her own turbulent adolescence. The thread that connects past and present is bipolar disorder, which […]
Today we review three very different novels about families, none of them easy. The families, that is! Koren Zailckas is well-known for her memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (Viking, 2005). Mother, Mother is her first novel, and it introduces a doozy of a family dynamic. The story includes elements of suspense, psychological thriller and […]
I don’t watch a lot of TV, especially not TV news or TV tabloids, so while I feel confident that I had heard something about Amanda Knox in the past six years, I really only became aware of the ins and outs of her infamous life this year. But when I did become aware, it […]
Kathryn Harrison‘s latest novel centers on Rasputin’s daughter, Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina. After Rasputin’s death, his 18-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family. When the royal family is placed under house arrest, Masha begins telling stories (both true and imagined) to distract young Aloysha, a hemophiliac, from his […]
The publication of a new novel by Anne Rice is always an event, and especially when she begins a new series. The Wolf Gift is a werewolf novel that displays her unique combination of philosophy, sensuality and gothic horror. I was thrilled to interview Anne Rice for the AB4T blog, and Random House is also […]
Working through barriers of language, culture and gender, American Katherine Boo spent over three years in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. Her extraordinary book reveals the truth of life in urban India. Again and again, reviews mention her novelistic writing, the uncovering of Dickensian depths of corruption, and the detail with which she brings to […]
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