ok its been awhile since i posted have had a bit of writers block i guess you could say. however i have been doing some reading a found a few novels you might or might not enjoy. here is what i thought of a few books.
256 pages; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | iBookstore | IndieBound
Radio Iris
The Innocents
Authors love to rewrite classics, but the result is usually parlor-game fiction, fun mainly for references to the original. A happy exception is Francesca Segal's good-natured The Innocents, which pays homage to but deviates in significant ways from its inspiration, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Although the upper-class Wasps in Wharton's late-19th-century New York have become middle-class Jews in contemporary London, the plot remains: A young man's attraction to a woman of questionable reputation threatens his engagement to the fiancée his insular community expects him to marry. But while Wharton was exposing social hypocrisy and the dangers to women of independent spirit, in Segal's bittersweet novel characters embrace their 21st-century right to ambivalence about social continuity. Emotionally confused Adam vacillates between safe, predictable Rachel, his childhood sweetheart, and her iconoclastic cousin Ellie, newly returned from New York. Meanwhile Ellie envies Adam's sense of belonging, just as Adam discovers that his world may be "elastic, far more than he'd allowed himself to admit. It was he who had been rigid." The real surprise here, though, is Rachel, who is forced by financial, medical, and emotional crises to abandon her bubble of naive certainty. "With the sacrifice of her innocence...she had bought her strength. To Adam, she had never been more beautiful."
Father's Day
256 pages; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | iBookstore | IndieBound
When his boy Zach was born, on one "suffocating" August day in 1983, Buzz Bissinger "just felt like walking away." The younger (by three minutes) of twins born 13 and a half weeks premature, Zach was severely mentally disabled, and his father, a journalist who would one day find fame with Friday Night Lights, could hardly handle it. "I also knew that if he survived, he would not remotely be the son I imagined," Bissinger writes. "Which is a nicer way of saying he would not remotely be the son I wanted." Nicer? Maybe...but visceral, arresting, and frank are better descriptions of Father's Day, Bissinger's account of a 2007 cross-country road trip he took with the then-24-year-old Zach. A self-confessed "cranky son of a bitch," Bissinger hadn't exactly abandoned Zach, but he'd never fully understood his son's mind and heart, either, thanks to divorce and admitted self-absorption; what the trip reveals is that the younger Bissinger isn't always the one who needs understanding. (The scene in which Buzz thinks he has lost his camera bag and anxious, impaired Zach must calm him down is a heartbreaking masterpiece of role reversal.) What is "normal"? And what does normal have to do with feelings? Those are the questions Bissinger explores in this unusual memoir about a very dysfunctional guy—and the son who loves him.
Vandal Love
Don't think of Vandal Love as a page-turner. It's a novel you'll want to read slowly, savoring prose that's both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy. Deni Y. Béchard's masterful debut sweeps through North America from rural early-20th-century Quebec to an ashram in 21st-century New Mexico, following several generations of a French-Canadian family in which "children were born alternately brutes or runts." Family patriarch Hervé Hervé, a farmer and fisherman who speaks of his larger children as "keepers" (some of the small ones he actually gives away), "had become as hard as the country...so that it was he his children now fled." As Hervé's progeny scatter south and west from Quebec, each is driven by a visceral longing to connect, whether to God or mere humans. But whatever happiness they manage to find never lasts long. Inevitably Hervé's descendants leave, or are left by, anyone who could soothe their loneliness. And the path to God is, as one character comes to realize, "the least sure of all roads." If this unusual story—like its characters—occasionally seems to wander without a clear destination, the final stunningly poignant pages prove that Béchard knew exactly where he was taking us all along.
Radio Iris
Iris, the receptionist at Larmax, Inc., starts each day by flicking on copiers and answering phones with the "corporate-approved greeting." Radio Iris tells the story of this 20-something's daily schedule and her interactions with two cryptic male characters: her boss, whose erratic behavior makes Iris question the company's future, and a stranger who is living in the office next door, setting off the fire alarm and bathing in the men's room. At first, "as long as she had a place to go every morning...and as long as she didn't have to look directly at the earth's edge," Iris is fine. But when she obsesses about the man on the other side of the wall, life is never mundane again. Anne-Marie Kinney's debut novel uses flatline prose to convey Iris's dull loneliness and her yearning to make herself visible to the world.
