Fools

Fools is a collection of short stories by Joan Silber. I'm not generally a fan of short stories, as they always leave me wanting more and I find it is the rare writer who is accomplished at writing in this format. Silber is one of them.

This is a great collection of seemingly simple stories about ordinary people going about their lives. There is the daughter of missionaries who grows up to be an anarchist, and in later stories we meet her daughters. I loved how the characters overlapped and Silber was able to weave the tales seamlessly, with great emotional depth.

One of the better collections of short stories that I have read.

The House of Impossible Loves

The House of Impossible Loves by Cristina Lopez Barrio is a saga about the Laguna family. A family of women cursed to have only girl children and to be unlucky in love. When Santiago is born, it seems the curse has been lifted, but not entirely.

Lopez Barrio is a good storyteller, and although it is reminiscent of Isabelle Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she is not really in their league. Although it was well written, it was hard to care about most of the characters in the story, so I found myself waiting for it to be over.

The River of No Return

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway is a time travel novel starting in present day New England and travelling back to 19th century London. There is a mysterious society called The Guild that is able to move back and forth through time.

I love time travel novels, and this one did not disappoint; full of romance, mystery and adventure. I loved it all the way until the end when it left me hanging with many unanswered questions. Hoping a sequel is in the works. A fun read.

Minding Frankie

Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy is a sweet novel about a little girl named Frankie, whose mother dies the day she is born. She is raised by a community of well meaning people in a small Dublin neighborhood.

Her Father learns about her only weeks before she is born, and tries hard to give up drinking, find a better job and do the best he can to raise Frankie. He has help from a wonderful array of characters who try to protect Frankie from a bitter social worker. Binchy does a great job of getting the reader to care about all of them.

Beautifully written, heartfelt, feel good novel. Goes great with a hot cup of tea on a cold winters day.

The Miniaturist

The Miniaturist is the highly popular new novel by Jesse Burton. Set in Amsterdam in 1686, the story is based on the actual miniature cabinet house made for Petronella Oortman, on view today in The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. This is the one historical truth in the novel that Burton imagines her story around.

It is a fascinating portrait of 17th century Amsterdam at the height of the Dutch East India Company. There are many secrets being kept in the house Petronella moves into, where her new husband and his sister live. She is mostly alone except for the servants and her cabinet house. I was drawn into the tale as soon as the tiny furniture and cryptic notes started appearing, and was most fascinated to find out the miniaturist was a woman.

However, the miniaturist eludes Nella and the reader throughout the book, and although this added mystery to the story for a while, I found it frustrating by the end. An original novel that transported me to old Amsterdam, however, mildly disappointing by the end.

Hurricane Sisters

Hurricane Sisters is a novel by Dorthea Benton Frank set in Charleston, South Carolina. It focuses on the lives of three generations of women. Told from several points of view, sometimes the novel worked and sometimes it didn't.

It was a little preachy about domestic violence and abuse against women. There are some very sobering facts here about how many women die each day due to domestic violence and how South Carolina leads the country in the number of homicides.

An okay, slightly predictable read.

In the Memorial Room

In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame (author of An Angel at My Table) is a newly published novel ten years after Frame's death and forty years after it was written.

Harry Gill has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, and he arrives in the small French village of Menton, only to find the Memorial Room where he is supposed to write, cold, dank and with no facilities. 

Frame is a wonderful writer, and this is quite a funny little novel based on her own year in Menton as winner of the Mansfield Fellowship. Frame is one of New Zealand's greatest writers; if you haven't read her yet, you should.