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The Invisible Ones is Stef Penney’s follow up to her acclaimed debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves. It opens with private investigator Ray Lovell in the hospital recovering from a brush with death via an unidentified poisonous substance. The hospital staff suspects that it may have been self-administered, but as Ray swims through strange, frightening hallucinations and recovers [...]
In Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters, Rose, Bean, and Cordy are sisters at a crossroads in their lives, and are suddenly living back home together just as their mother is diagnosed with breast cancer (for which she begins treatment). Their father is a renowned Shakespeare professor, and when he bothers speaking, it’s often in Shakespearean verse- so [...]
In Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Jack and Mabel are a middle-aged married couple who have moved to Alaska in the 1920′s to attempt the successful farming of a homestead. The land is harsh and unforgiving, and though it is of their own choosing, the couple is isolated from family, and have made no friends in the tiny [...]
Ella Thomas is a down on her luck eighteen-year-old – just days away from not being able to pay rent – when she auditions for a gig as a jazz singer. After completing of a rigorous interview process she finds out that she has been recruited by an arm of the military for an assignment that only she [...]
When Myfanwy Thomas regains consciousness she is standing in the rain surrounded by dead people wearing latex gloves. Armed with only a mysterious letter that she finds in her coat pocket, and absolutely no memory, Myfanwy has to assimilate into a life previously inhabited by a former incarnation of herself. The letter leads her to make a choice- and to more letters- that explain a [...]
Doug Magee’s Darkness All Around focuses on Sean, an alcoholic whose life is unraveling, and his mysterious disappearance from the small town in which he’d grown up and married his childhood friend, Risa. After Sean is missing for several years, Risa finally has him declared dead and goes on with life to the best of her ability. She [...]
15-year-old Pearl lives with her mother in a small house on her uncle’s property in Fallbrook, California. She is used to hanging out with her cousin Robbie and her Uncle Hoyt, an avocado farmer using both legal and illegal immigrant labor to work his ranch. When Pearl spots Amiel, a young migrant miming and juggling in the [...]
It wasn’t until after I’d read Audrey Niffenegger’s novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry that I found out she was also an illustrator and graphic novelist. She has two earlier “novels-in-pictures” The Adventuress (which I’ve since read) and The Three Incestuous Sisters. The Adventuress was really, really strange, but still I picked up a [...]
A version of this review first appeared at Reader Unboxed on 11/10/11. In Lisa Black‘s Defensive Wounds, the fourth in her series on the adventures of forensic scientist and crime scene investigator Theresa McLean, Theresa continues working cases and raising her teen aged daughter in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work often overlaps with that of her cousin Frank, who [...]
In The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen, Zed is a government agent from the future masquerading as Leroy Jones, a non-descript worker in the private sector in Washington D.C. Zed is from the Perfect Present, a time in the future when the majority of people have successfully integrated themselves into a raceless, classless, strifeless society. This change occurs [...]