At the heart of Louise Erdrich’s new novel The Night Watchman is the battle over Native dispossession. Thomas Wazhashk is a night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Reservation’s first factory, a jewel-bearing plant. His character is based upon Erdrich’s grandfather, whose letters and personal accounts provided insight and a valuable resource as she wrote the …
In the opening scene of Jane Harper’s, The Lost Man, two brothers stand at the grave sight of an old stockman where they have found the body of their brother, Cameron. Brothers Nathan, Cameron, and Bub Bright grew up on this remote land in the Australian outback; so flat “it seemed possible to detect the …
Peter Geye is back with the third installment of the Eide family story, Northernmost. Like the first in the series, Lighthouse Road, Northernmost alternates between two generations. In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a harrowing near-death seal hunting expedition in the Arctic to his own funeral. He’s been missing and presumed dead. His …
Olive Kitteridge is back in Elizabeth Strout’s sequel, Olive, Again. It’s been over ten years since we last heard from Olive, and she is still the acerbic, cantankerous, highly opinionated, yet reservedly empathetic Olive that we’ve come to know and love. Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for Olive Kitteridge, a novel in short …
NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS by Allen Eskens is a coming-of-age mystery that reads like literary fiction. Boady Sanden is a fifteen-year-old freshman at Ignatius High School in Jessup, Missouri. If you’ve read Eskens other novels, you may recognize Boady’s name from The Life We Bury and The Heavens May Fall, in those books, he is older …
There are lots of places I would gladly return to, but the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead is not one that I would relish to revisit in real life. But in fiction? Sign me up. Especially, if the regime is about to come down at the hands of a woman. Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s …
In 2016, Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his novel, Underground Railroad. At the apex of his career, it could be a downhill slide from there – but Colson Whitehead just keeps getting better. In the midst of writing a crime novel, Whitehead read the story of the Arthur …
Ocean Vuong won the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize for his critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is lyrical and crushing, framed as a letter from a son to his mother who cannot read. Little Dog lives with his volatile and abusive …
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger is a big-hearted novel that doesn’t disappoint. Four orphans form an unlikely family in 1932 Minnesota: Motherless Odie O’Banion and his brother Albert, are the only Caucasians at the Lincoln Indian Training School, committed there after their father’s death; their friend Mose, a Native American boy whose tongue …
It’s not often that I review a book with these two disparate comments: I loved this book, but I disliked the ending. Typically, if I don’t like the ending of a book, it ruins the entire thing for me. Not the case for Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Let’s back track. The book’s …
