Reviews

When it was first released, I asked my husband to go to the theater with me to see Amelia. He said, ‘no’. I tried to bribe him with a big bag of buttered popcorn but that didn’t work.

George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan is, like the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, not a brilliant piece of work, but it's so enthusiastically done, I couldn't helped by be charmed and entertained by it.

"Blood on the Tracks" isn't the best album of Bob Dylan's long, sinuous career. It's also far from the worst, and with the passing years, this mid-1970s effort seems to have acquired more musical and intellectual heft.

True, there may be some rather slight songs here, including "You're a Big Girl Now" and "Buckets of Rain" -- but only if measured against Dylan warhorses such as "Positively 4th Street" or "Like a Rolling Stone."

Another mystery with dark humor, Benacquista has offered up something quite different from his previous book, Framed, takes place in the Paris art world.

Jim Harrison considers himself a poet first and a fiction writer second. Maybe that’s part of the reason his novels and novellas read so well: He has a poet’s gift for elevated language coupled with the heart of a storyteller.

Before heading straight to the self-help books when you come to the library looking for psychological insight, be aware that reading fiction can also have strong therapeutic benefits. One example to check out is Laura Moriarty’s The Rest of Her Life. Moriarty received a degree in social work from KU, which is excellent training for the themes she explores in her novel: social status and crime, parent/child relationships, and cyclical family dynamics.

Translated from Spanish, this tale was written for readers who enjoy “living” in a novel by getting into the skins of the characters and following their relationships through joy and travail. The story begins in 1945 Barcelona following the Spanish Civil War – and the atmosphere of the city almost becomes a character in itself.

Book Review
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Haley, age 17, has been missing for three months and the family is losing hope. Wendy Tynes, TV News Reporter, has set up a sting to catch Dan Mercer in a pedophilia assignation. Wendy is positive that Dan is a pedophile who has been terrorizing her New Jersey town. Coben once again weaves a tangled web of intrigue and suspense in this page turner.

Alice Hayward was strangled by her husband on the evening following her baptism. Her husband’s dead body is found in the same room and it is assumed that he shot himself. However, complications are discovered in the form of Alice’s diary.