Fiction
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This Is Not Your City
Caitlin Horrocks
You could summarize this collection as: stories of isolation from the perspective of female characters. While I think the collection could have varied a bit more in overall feeling, Caitlin Horrocks creates some pretty exceptional moments and her characters are distinct. She has a very intuitive perspective that makes for rich stories that feel...more
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Long Division
Kiese Laymon
There are just enough time periods and stories within stories woven into this novel that in some ways I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief and not examine the technicalities too closely or the shifts and nested turns wouldn’t actually line up. But I read most of the book in one day, so it was not difficult to get lost in the...more
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Fen
Daisy Johnson
Fanciful stories situated in eastern England’s marshy flatlands, populated with creatures from folklore and comprised of odd events only partially explained. The local pub is always the Fox and Hounds, and the narrator is always a woman, and usually she is young. There isn’t much differentiation in the characters and...more
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Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck
I read Go, Went, Gone several months ago, and if I hadn’t collected some notes back then I probably wouldn’t have been able to post anything about it. Happily I wrote down enough to resurface some memories, as this is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It has a clear political message, so it will appeal...more
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Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Compared to A Visit From the Goon Squad and other pieces of short fiction Jennifer Egan has published in the years since, her newest novel Manhattan Beach is unexpectedly straightforward. Moving from those experimental, future-reaching works, she has turned to historical...more
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The Book of Dust
Philip Pullman
Seventeen years after the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman returns to the same world for a new trilogy, La Belle Sauvage. While this first book in the new series does include the character Lyra who was the heart of the first series, she is only a baby...more
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Wildwood Imperium
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
A jam-packed finale to this trilogy set in a version of Portland where Forest Park is the Impassable Wilderness, a magical land most humans in the city can’t physically enter. After establishing a new set of characters and new thread of narrative in the second book, this one starts with yet another new thread. It makes the story get...more
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of queer poetry and apparently also fiction involving ghosts as characters. Like Katalin Street, Jesmyn Ward’s third novel involves spirits of those who have passed on but haven’t entirely departed the company of the living. Here they are a...more
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Katalin Street
Magda Szabó
Fragmented and a bit confusing while meeting all the characters, Katalin Street spans key moments before, during, and after the German occupation of Budapest for three intertwined families in Budapest. Before the war, they have an idyllic life as neighbors in three row houses on Katalin Street, and the novel portrays the effects of...more
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Forest Dark
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love has been a standby favorite I recommend to people often — something I’ve noted while writing about every subsequent book of hers that I’ve read. Realizing now that it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve read it makes me think it’s time for a re-read, especially...more