Cash Blackbear is back in the second book in Marcie Rendon’s series, Girl Gone Missing. It’s not necessary to read the first in the series, Murder on the Red River, but you will want to. Rendon sprinkles enough of Cash’s backstory throughout the second book so that you’ll never be lost. In Girl Gone Missing, …
The star of Marcie Rendon’s Murder on the Red River is Renee Blackbear, who goes by the nickname Cash. She’s nineteen years old and a survivor of numerous foster homes — one of the many Native children removed from their homes and placed with white foster parents. When Cash was three, her mother lost her …
As Deborah Appleman enters the maximum security prison where she teaches prisoners, she hands off her license, jewelry, shoes — all the talismans of her identity – and walks through the metal detector; one that she says puts airport security scanners to shame. Her materials are in a clear plastic book bag and her right …
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 …
In 2011 George Hodgman left Manhattan after a notable career as an editor for various magazines and publishing houses, including Houghton Mifflin and Vanity Fair, to return to Paris, Missouri to care for his aging mother. He had recently lost his job and was working freelance, feeling at loose ends alone in his apartment all …
Swede Hollow by Ola Larsmo, translated by Tiina Nunnally, is a family saga that follows Gustaf and Anna Klar and their three children from Sweden to New York and eventually to Swede Hollow in St. Paul in the early twentieth century. Gustaf and Anna leave Sweden in 1897 under a shroud of fog and a …
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 the winter of 2001, Sheila O’Connor accompanied her mother, June to the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul in search of information on her mother’s birth and adoption, armed with a letter from the court granting her mother’s access to her own history. O’Connor’s mother was born in 1935 …
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 …
