A lovely and simply told tale of grief and loss, survival and renewal. This is the story of Nora Webster, a newly-widowed 40-year-old woman in a claustrophobic Irish town who must suddenly face not just the challenge of financial security and raising her children without a husband, but how to step back into the mainstream of life after 21 years of housekeeping and childrearing. She is depressed, angry, secretive, and resentful in turns, and often too self-absorbed to help her children with their grief. She […]
Sociopaths and Avarice — a nasty combination
Big strong strapping Justice Department lawyer Theo Buchanan gets his life saved by Dr. Michelle Renard, a tough little lady from rural Louisiana, and it’s love at first sight…almost. First, Theo has to sleuth out who vandalized the doc’s brand-new hard-won clinic. At first, they think it might be the work of malicious teenagers, then of an angry patient, but pretty quickly they figure out that this was too professional a job, and that whoever did it was searching for something. Noah Clayton, a scarily […]
A complicated and depressing closeup of post-’60s politics and race relations
Oates takes on a huge task in this novel, attempting not only to penetrate the ever-present veil of race relations in American society, but also the heady politics of the Vietnam War era, through the characters of two emotionally skewed young women, one black and one white. We are told at the very beginning that this tale is written by 33-year-old Genna Meade (the white girl) as an “untitled text” about an incident that had happened 15 years earlier. Genna grew up in the 60s […]
Abusive Husbands and Murder
Haven’t read a Patterson thriller in a long time, but picked this 1996 book up for free and gave it a whirl. Pretty scary actually, with multiple villains. Maggie is sitting in jail writing her tragic story and awaiting trial for the murder of her husband. Oh wait, for the second murder of her second husband! The story starts out really creepy, with her and her baby daughter hiding under the porch while her insane alcoholic abuser husband with a gun searches for her. He […]