Hannah is haunted. Her best friend Lillian—still thin and wasted from the anorexia that killed her—follows Hannah around, commenting on her fake friends, her occasionally grisly job processing police photographs, and especially Finny Boone, a seemingly dangerous boy with a kind heart that Hannah can’t help but be drawn to.
This sometimes drawn-out tale revolves around the life of Dorothy Nicolson and her family. It moves between present day, 1959 and 1942. Chapter headings help the reader keep track of the time frame. Dorothy is dying and her daughter, Laurel, wants to learn the reason for a murder she saw her mother commit in 1959. She tries to talk wit
Psychologist Chris Kelvin, played by George Clooney, arrives on a spaceship near the planet Solaris to investigate why the crew is suffering. Kelvin has a vivid dream of his deceased wife his first night on the ship and then discovers her lying next to him after wakening.
With interwoven recipes and memories, Molly Wizenberg divulges her story, a memoir that blossoms from a blog she created in the aftermath of her father’s death.
At the end of the Victorian period, Edward Moon is a stage magician and detective whose fame is fading away. Trying to restore his former glory, he and his assistant, the Somnambulist (fancy name for sleepwalker), get caught in a twisted, nightmarish mystery where nothing is quite what it seems.
With The City & the City, China Miéville has created a fascinating, exciting story that takes a premise that could have come straight from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges and turns it into the kind of hardboiled detective story Borges would have loved.
It’s interesting to me how choices I made as a child continue to shape my perceptions to this very day. Some examples include: Han Solo is cooler than Luke Skywalker, John Lennon is cooler than Paul McCartney, and cheese pizza is a waste of time. But what has astonished me lately is that some of my childhood prejudices have changed.
The Shoemaker’s Wife is a love story set in the early 1900’s, first in the Italian Alps when Enza and Ciro meet and leave a very distinct impression on each other, then later in New York City where they meet up again by chance.
Catherynne M.
