I’ve only read Macbeth once before now, and it was halfway through my undergrad, so I didn’t really remember anything about it other than, “Out, damned spot!” and the witches chanting “double, double toil and trouble”. Incidentally, I’m never going to forget that second one, because a) the film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban turned it into a song (the kids were holding large toads?????), and b) It’s also the name of a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movie I watched […]
A Beautiful Debut
This is a slow, quiet novel that captures readers at the start with its intensity. The stakes are high for everyone, even before we discover the tragedy that has befallen Kyung’s family. In the beginning, Kyung is already faced with the necessity of swallowing his pride and moving back in with his parents. But when Kyung’s mother shows up in his backyard, beaten and battered, Kyung knows who is to blame before the accusatory words escape her mouth. He suspects that his father, who has […]
A book about the American character and the ties that bind
Thompson opened up an unfamiliar world for me inside my very own country, the world of the mid-West where change comes more slowly … but inexorably. Jean Thompson’s book reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that it offers a long view of a mid-western family’s trials and tribulations. And yet Thompson treats her characters with the poignancy and compassion that real, if flawed, people deserve, while Franzen’s characters were too often caricaturized and mocked for my taste. The Ericksons are a […]
A Novelist’s Profound Discourse on Human Suffering
This was my first foray into the writing of Ruth Rendell, who now apparently publishes under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, and I was affected to the core by what some reviewers call her finest work. She takes the story of an outwardly successful family—a popular British author, his two beloved daughters, his caring wife—and forges a mystery so infused with sadness and psychological trauma that it can leave no reader unscathed. Gerald Candless is an imposing figure of a man—deep-voiced and towering, with leonine […]