https://killingmykindle.com/2018/07/30/episode-1-28-time-keeps-on-slipping-slipping-slipping/ Wherein I review: 108. The October List by Jeffery Deaver 109. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai 110. Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt A mystery that starts with the last chapter and works its way backwards. One book that jumps between 1985 and 2015 between Chicago and Paris while straddling the AIDS epidemic. One book told through journal entries and letters from an author while reimagining the Nabokov love triangle. I loved them all in their own little ways, but I loved […]
A Hundred Years of Secrets
Goodreads summary: “Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the […]
Artists + Ghosts = Good Story
This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like a haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. The Hundred-Year House is the fictional story of an artists’ colony called Laurelfield, just outside Chicago near Lake Michigan. In the afterward, Makkai writes that one theme is the need artists have for community. Other themes would be the masks that people wear, hiding themselves from even those […]