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 …
At the age of 23, author Shannon Gibney was awarded a prestigious Carnegie Mellon fellowship and traveled to Ghana to research the connections between African Americans and continental Africans. While there, she stumbled upon the history of Liberia—colonized in the 19th century by freed African American slaves only to recreate the conditions of oppression they …
In 2016, Dani Shapiro, like so many others, submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com on a whim. What she found out would change her life forever – her father was not her father. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love is the story of Dani Shapiro’s search for her biological father. Whenever Dani told people …
It’s not hard to like Lorna Landvik’s characters – they’re familiar – like your curmudgeonly uncle, your lovable sister, your best friend, your nosy neighbor – they are funny and sad and flawed. In Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes) Landvik introduces us to Haze Evans whose column has run for over fifty years …
Kate Atkinson, author of Life After Life and A God in Ruins, is back with another blockbuster, Transcription. Protagonist Juliet Armstrong is only eighteen, and recently orphaned, when she is recruited by an MI5, the United Kingdom’s counter-intelligence and security agency. Her task is to transcribe the recordings taken from a bugged flat, though she …
Matt Goldman’s third book in the Nils Shapiro series, The Shallows will be released in June and like the others it is set in Minnesota, this time he and partner Ellegaard of Stone Arch Investigations have been hired to investigate the murder of attorney Todd Rabinowitz, whose body is found in Christmas Lake secured to …
There There by Tommy Orange won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut novel of 2018. It was heralded as one of the Best Books of 2018 by some of the leading news organizations and magazines for good reason. This book wrecked me. If you want a …
Julie Schumacher is the first woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Dear Committee Members. Jason Fitger is back in the sequel, The Shakespeare Requirement. The hapless Professor Fitger is now chairman of the English Department at Payne University. Sounds like a promotion, right? Think again. He has no budget and won’t …
