When Frances and Lily confront their radically altered existence, the narrative culminates in a breathtaking denouement. British writer Waters (The Little Stranger) deserves a large audience.
This is the strength of Chbosky’s writing. He crafts Charlie’s voice in a way that defies context. Charlie is inside every lonely teenager and every adult remembers him fondly. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a gift...
“In One Person” gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes.
This book is beautifully crafted and written with understanding for those people who have disabilities. The description and the story are well thought out and there are parts that make you cry and parts that make you laugh.
After reading the book, I feel like I managed to pick up the main ideas that Oscar Wilde was trying to convey.
In his singularly perceptive voice, Lamb immerses his characters and the novel’s readers in powerful moments of hope and redemption and shocking descriptions of violence and abuse.
The fact that Eilis doesn't always live at a high pitch is just another of the things that make her seem so real. It should also only really be taken as a compliment to the book that one reaches the end hungry for more.
The greatest pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its prose.
It’s a tender, honest exploration of identity and sexuality, and a passionate reminder that love—whether romantic or familial—should be open, free, and without shame.
Beautiful prose, tangible emotion, and a constantly lingering sense of dread make what should be a fairly short reading experience an intense and disturbing experience.
A rousing labor of love by a major contemporary author, Kavalier & Clay reveals that sometimes the horrors generated by popular artists can both reflect and ricochet.
This is a repeat for a novel we reported last March (see P. 125). We liked it then; we like it still. Literary Guild choice for September, it should go farther than the usual first novel.
Reading this book is both heartbreaking and entertaining. It reveals a woman who tried to balance expectations of greatness with anxieties about falling short.
This well-known story marks the beginning of perhaps the greatest, possibly most influential, and certainly the most world-famous Victorian English fiction, a book that hovers between a nonsense tale and an elaborate in-joke.
Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm. Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
You come away from this biography surprised less by the larksome adventures than by his incorruptible work ethic.
Yet he fails to present atheism as an affirmative, joyful choice. Few secular Christians will leave their traditions, dysfunctional as they are, for his cold refuge of skeptics and stuffed shirts.
Then Came You is a perfect summer read, complete with soap opera-like vignettes, romance and fantasy.
Today, while not as merciless in its analysis as The House of Mirth, Wharton's late masterpiece stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture and in desperate need of a European sensibility.
So successful are these elements that the overdetermined, even trite conclusion will probably strike readers as a minor bump in the road. Here’s a narrative experience readers won’t soon forget.