Tag: Fiction

New Boy

May 23, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: It’s a month before the end of the school year and Osei, son of a Ghanaian diplomat, is starting his first day at a new school in a new city: Washington DC. He meets fellow sixth grader Dee and the two immediately fall for one another. But troublemaker Ian (not to mention the barely-covertly racist teachers) are having none of it… and by the end of the school day, much will have changed for everyone. The Review: […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Fiction, Hogarth Shakespeare, Literature, New Boy, Othello, Shakespeare, Tracy Chevalier

Borne

April 25, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Sometime in a dangerous, destroyed future, a woman named Rachel survives on the fringes of a ruined city with her partner. They avoid creatures great and small, fight small territorial skirmishes, and eke out a life. But when Rachel brings home a strange creature, which she names Borne, everything changes. Who is Borne? What is he – and what will he become? The Review: It is quite something to find an author relatively early in one’s adult […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi • Tags: Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Borne, Fiction, Jeff Vandermeer, Literature, review, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Speculative

Universal Harvester

March 28, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: It’s the late 1990s and Jeremy’s working for a small video store in Nevada, Iowa. He’s thinking, slowly, about his future – but then customers begin to complain of strange scenes spliced into their VHS tapes. He starts to look into it… but some mysteries are, perhaps, never possible to explain. The Review: It shouldn’t come as any surprise, to those who know John Darnielle’s work (either his fiction or his music), that reading Universal Harvester conjures a particular […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Advance Review, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, John Darnielle, Literature, review, Reviews, Universal Harvester

The Intuitionist

March 23, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Lila Mae Watson is the first colored female elevator inspector in history – and she’s an Intuitionist, maybe the best they’ve ever had. But when a brand new elevator that she inspected goes into total freefall two weeks before the Elevator Guild elections, she must go on the run to prove her good name. What she discovers along the way might change everything… The Review: It is almost shocking to pick up a debut novel from an […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Colson Whitehead, Elevators, Fiction, Literature, review, Reviews, The Intuitionist

The Bluest Eye

March 16, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: A young black girl named Pecola living in post-Depression small-town Ohio wishes for blue eyes. Two of her schoolmates, wary of her, recount what they know about this young woman – as, meanwhile, far darker things occur above the level of child understanding. Pecola’s family’s history comes to influence their present – and to ensure that their future is a bleak one. The Review: I rarely read forewords before I read classics that I’ve never read before. More […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, Literature, Morrison 2017, Reviews, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

March 6, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Two short novels of a young man in Tokyo, just before and just after college. He and his friend the Rat drink at J’s Bar, have variable luck with women, and ultimately try to figure out what to do with their lives – but that’s a taller order than they anticipated. The Review: It’s always intriguing, from an anthropological kind of standpoint, to discover a beloved author’s earliest work after you’ve already become familiar with their collected […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Books in Translation, Fiction, Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing, Literature, Pinball 1973, Reviews, Ted Goossen, The Rat, Translation, Trilogy of the Rat, Wind/Pinball

Roundup: February 2017

March 1, 2017 by Drew

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch Rating: 3 out of 5 The Short Version: Locke Lamora is a young thief at the head of a band of merry misfits known as the Gentlemen Bastards. Alternating between tales of his rise to the head of the Bastards and an ongoing story in Camorr that starts as a simple job but quickly expands to be far more deadly, it’s time to meet Locke Lamora… The Review: I had the highest of hopes for this […]

Categories: Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic Novel, Horror, Literature, Mystery, Spy • Tags: All Hail God Mammon, All the Old Knives, CIA, Comic Books, Douglas Preston, Elizabeth Strout, Fantasy, Fiction, Gentlemen Bastards, Horror, Jonathan Hickman, Lincoln Child, Literature, My Name is Lucy Barton, myths, Neil Gaiman, norse mythology, Olen Steinhauer, Pendergast, Preston & Child, Review Roundup, Roundup, Scott Lynch, Spy, Storytelling, The Black Monday Murders, The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Obsidian Chamber, The Tournament of Books 2017, Thriller, Tomm Coker

Version Control

February 26, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Something feels slightly off about the world Rebecca Wright is living in, as though things have shifted in some small way that she can’t define. Her husband is a scientist working on a causality violation device (NOT A TIME MACHINE) and her son is perhaps misunderstood by both of them. After a horrible accident, Rebecca’s life changes irrevocably – or… does it? What if her husband’s work is exactly what he thinks it isn’t? The Review: Remember that Michael […]

Categories: Fiction, Sci-Fi • Tags: Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Dexter Palmer, Fiction, Literature, review, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, The Tournament of Books 2017, Time Travel, Version Control

The Mothers

February 21, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Nadia is a high school senior, ready to escape her small California town for college. The abortion she has seems, at the time, to be the best choice – but while her life goes on without much pause, the lives of those around her are deeply affected and will be for the rest of their days. The Review: Another ToB Irregular wrote on Twitter that this book is an exploration of the following question: “What if your […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: Abortion, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Brit Bennett, Family, Fiction, Literature, Religion, review, Reviews, Riverhead Books, The Mothers, The Tournament of Books 2017

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Raging Biblio-holism

The overwhelming urge to collect, consume, and consider books