Category Archives: Book Review
Contents May Have Shifted
The quirky and unusual “travel novel” Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston takes you on a roller-coaster ride both around the world and through the author’s stormy relationships with men. Pam Houston is also the author of the hilarious Cowboys Are … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction
YA Yes I Am
Do you recall me stating that I absolutely do not read Young Adult (YA) novels? I am constantly saying how glad I am that I catalog the YA books, since I’m never tempted to put one on hold. Despite having … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Young Adult
Heartwood 2:3 – Spurious
“Somehow or another…you have to find your own path through contemporary culture. You have to dig your own burrow, following various transverse connections between things.” – Lars Iyer Sometimes a book will really set off the fireworks. Spurious, by Lars … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Heartwood, Humor
Blueprints of the Afterlife
Early reviews sing the praises of Ryan Boudinot’s new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife. Novelist Charles Yu calls it “a mind-bending tour of the edges of technology and possibility.” Reviewer Andrea Appleton remarks that “each scene is rendered in such captivating, … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction
Working in the Shadows
We often don’t think about how the food we eat comes to be on our supermarket shelves. Turns out, there’s a lot of very hard, dangerous, and sometimes mind-numbingly boring work that goes into it. In Working in the Shadows, author Gabriel Thompson decided … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Nonfiction, Society & Politics
Heartwood 2:2 – Kelroy
The big literary celebration this year will be the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’ birth (Feb 7), but 2012 also marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the only novel by a little-known American author, Rebecca Rush. Her novel Kelroy was largely overlooked upon its … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Heartwood, Historical Fiction
Ashes
I am so over zombie books. At least I thought I was until I picked up Ilsa J. Bick’s Ashes. At the beginning of this young adult novel we meet Alex who has a brain tumor and has been given 6 months … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, Horror
New Noir
I’ve always been drawn to psychological novels that show the dark side…the internal struggles that complex intelligent characters have to wrestle with. These three new superbly crafted novels definitely have that “noir” feeling, with their cinematic intensity and vivid characters. … Continue reading
Filed under Book Lists, Book Review, Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Suspense & Thriller
Heartwood 2:1 – By the Sound
Edward Dorn’s By the Sound revolves around the day-to-day lives of two couples struggling to do more than just scrape by while living in the Skagit valley in 1958. There is some very fine writing about our lowland environment that is … Continue reading
Filed under Book Review, Fiction, General Fiction, Historical Fiction


