Anna Quindlen writes at her best in this brilliant novel about Mimi Miller and her family as they come to grips with the US government’s plan to re-direct a local dam, thereby reclaiming an entire neighborhood which includes the Miller family home.
All in Fiction
CITY ON FIRE
First things first: this book is massive. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book this long and epic that wasn’t by Dickens or Dostoyevsky. But Hallberg knows what he is doing, and I never once found myself counting pages. He keeps the story moving, the mystery unraveling, and the cast of characters constantly changing. He even varies the format, inserting “interludes” with snippets of newspaper articles, journals and even a fan ‘zine.
OF BEES AND MIST
This book, at heart, is the story of an extended family over the course of five decades centering around the marriage of Meridia and Daniel. But both setting and style are unusual in the extreme, blending elements of fairy tale and magical realism to create a world like none I’ve ever experienced. If you are someone who needs to understand what is happening at every moment in a book—this is not the book for you. But if you are open to sinking into a metaphor and letting it wrap the story around you like, well, a mist—you’ve gotta read this!
HAG-SEED
A compelling story of a down-on-his-luck theater director making the most of a bad situation by accepting the challenge of directing Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST in a local prison using an all-male cast of inmates.
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET
Set in 1799, this is the captivating tale of a Dutchman who, in a quest to win his beloved’s hand in marriage, embarks on a five- year expedition with the Dutch East Indies Company to Nagasaki, Japan, that country’s only port open to trade with the west at that time.