Review by Sharon Samuel Harper Paperbacks, 2010 With gripping suspense and graphic honesty, Sofi Oksanen breathes life into “a world of brittle paper [and] moldy old albums emptied of pictures,” to create a tapestry where past meets present, and the shadow of war stands starkly against the prospect of peace. In her debut novel Purge, [...]

Review by Mayra David Harper Paperbacks, 2010 A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside. The characters in this book feel free [...]

Review by Rose Gold Inanna Publications, 2009 Butterfly Tears is a collection of fifteen short stories which oscillate between China and North America. Through memories, dreams, dialogue and the sparing use of symbol, these short stories speak of the almost unendurable hardship suffered in the “Cultural Revolution” of Mao’s China as well as the shock [...]

Review by Rhianon Huot Amy Einhorn Books Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010 Kelly O’Connor McNee’s The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott poses the question, “She taught us how to love … But who taught her?” This novel, based on Little Women, Louisa’s journals, letters, and biographies of Louisa’s life, is an imagining of [...]

Review by Mayra David iUniverse, 2009 One family, one story; seven voices, seven lives. In this beautifully written novel, Chitra Kallay explores that great tension between being the individual versus being a part of a whole. It may seem like a single, straightforward idea, but this idea is so well-explored in the the novel that [...]

Review by Mary Harwood Crown, 2010 A rich, eccentric old woman who keeps a vicious bull in her pasture. Two teen-aged boys who have lost their father in an horrific car accident fueled by alcohol and abandoned by their mother. When these two worlds collide, long-kept secrets break open old scars. The story starts with [...]

Crown/Shaye Areheart Books, 2010 Review by Hannah Eason Cora Sledge, the more-than-unlikely heroine of Leslie Larson’s Breaking Out of Bedlam, is overweight, decommissioned by a wide variety of pills she really shouldn’t have in the first place, and disoriented. This is the condition her grown children discover her in right before deciding to move her [...]

Shaye Areheart Books, 2009 Review by Mayra David This is a story that spans time, cultures, continents, even worlds. But for all that, its essence lies in the story of the Leahy family tragedy: Meave Leahy has lost her twin. It’s this tragedy that has since simultaneously driven and held her back in all aspects [...]