Book of the Week: Observations on womanhood
Life of the Party: PoemsBy Olivia Gatwood(153 pages, poetry, 2019)This collection of poems will make you want to step back every now and then to catch your breath. Gatwood’s impossible-to-ignore observations about women’s bodies – and men’s experiences of women’s bodies – are relayed in achingly unambiguous language. At times winsome, but often chilling, the poems in this collection get under your skin. The subject matter blends...
Book of the Week: Grand fantasy on Emerald Isle
An Irish Country Girl By Patrick Taylor (319 pages, fiction, 2010) Mrs. Maureen Kincaid (affectionately nicknamed “Kinky”) is a friendly and efficient housekeeper and cook for doctor Fingal Flahertie in the small town of Balleybucklebo in Ireland. She cooks wonderful meals and runs the doctor’s house with a sure hand and lots of common sense. But we don’t hear about her background much. This story is about Kinky when she was a...
Book of the Week: An important collection on racism
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race Edited by Jesmyn Ward (288 pages, essay/poetry, 2016) If you choose only one text to read in The Fire This Time…, let it be “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown. The poem rightfully opens this collection of essays and poems, the anthology itself a nod to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Ownership, slavery, police brutality, death — the speaker of this poem connects these as...
Book of the Week: Inspector Gamache back on the case
All the Devils are Here By Louise Penny (439 pages, mystery, 2020) Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté and his wife Reine-Marie travel from their small village of Three Pines in Canada to Paris to visit family. Their daughter Annie is just about to give birth and they want to be there to greet their new granddaughter. Annie’s husband is Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who was Armand’s second in command for years. Armand and Reine-Marie...
Book of the Week: Real or false isn’t clear
The Burn PalaceBy Stephen Dobyns(464 pages, fiction, 2013)The Burn Palace sets up a great mystery right from the beginning – a baby disappears from it’s hospital crib, replaced by a large snake. The setting is a small Rhode Island town, where nothing so extraordinary has happened since the town’s namesake was attacked and killed by wolves decades earlier.The tension builds to a violent crescendo as increasingly strange – possibly...
