B. Morrison's Blog, page 23

The Trespasser, by Tana French

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Tana French’s mystery series. The early ones are police procedurals, with members of Dublin’s Murder Squad as protagonists. Since it’s the same squad, a minor character from one book sometimes reappears or even stars in a later book.

That is the case here. The protagonist and secondary character from the previous book swap places. In The Secret Place, Detective Stephen Moran has been looking for an opportunity to get on the elite Murder Squad when it arrives as ...

We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz

Recently I attended a talk about the flood of hippies and other progressives moving to Vermont in the 1970s and this book was mentioned. Having lived in a rural part of the state briefly in 1971, I was well aware of how conservative it was and so have always been curious as to how these two wildly different populations managed to coexist. Daloz’s book, subtitled Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, helps me understand.

The story of the Myrtle Hill commune provides the n...

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

In a back alley in 1791 London, a wooden door opens to what appears to be a storeroom. However, those in the know are aware that behind a hidden door lies Nella Clavinger’s apothecary shop. Like her mother before her, she caters only to women and dispenses powders and salves to ease their pains. However, unlike her mother—and this is why her shop is secret—she also sells poisons to women who need to get rid of a man who is mistreating them.

Nella’s work with poisons has prematurely aged her, an...

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

This final novel in Lerner’s autofictional trilogy has been much written about and much praised. Minimally framed by his present-day adult self, the bulk of the book is Adam Gordon’s account of his teen years in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1990s. The events and circumstances mirror Lerner’s own.

A debating champion, Adam uses words aggressively and defensively both onstage and off. He’s a master of “the spread,” where debaters spout multiple arguments as fast as they can spit them out, making it...

The Moment Before the Wilt: Poetry, by Michelle Rose Goodwin

This chapbook of poems by my friend Michelle Rose Goodwin documents a year, starting with “June” and ending with “May (3).” It was a terrible year, perhaps the most difficult year of the author’s life, and the raw vulnerability of the poems speaks to our deepest fears and sorrows.

The voice in these poems—steady, not looking away, sounding like your best friend whispering at night after the lights are out—draws us into her world. Even if I hadn’t already known the author, I would have been cap...

The Question Is Murder, by Mark Willen

As Mr. Ethics, Sam Turner writes a column for a Washington, D.C. newspaper answering readers’ questions about right and wrong. He also teaches classes on ethics in journalism at a local college, so a reader’s moral dilemma would have to be pretty convoluted to challenge him.

Then he gets a letter asking if murder is ever justified.

The writer is a young woman who is being stalked and threatened by an ex-lover, one who is immune to her appeals and too powerful to be stopped through legal means. ...

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team.

Deems gets away with just losing an ear, but all the witnesses are shocked by the genial drunk’s use of violence. They are also concerned about the danger to Sportcoa...

A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

It starts with fire—after the muse has her say about the poet’s invocation, of course. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, awakens to find the Citadel, the highest point of the city of Troy on fire. Her husband and five-year-old son missing, and the fire is rapidly spreading throughout the city.

The city is falling. But that’s impossible. Troy has won the war. Just a few days earlier, they had seen the ships sail away, the Greeks finally giving up after ten grueling years of war without winning back Helen...

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

This third book in Robinson’s Gilead quartet was the only one I hadn’t read. Written from Lila’s point of view, we finally learn about this rather mysterious wife of John Ames, mother of his small son.

In Gilead we see her through Ames’s eyes: a reserved young woman who showed up in his church one day as he, already old, was preaching. To Ames, she is evidence of God’s grace, an unexpected and undeserved gift that brings joy to his lonely life. However, he frets about what will happen to her ...

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw

The nine brilliant short stories in this award-winning collection center on black women whose conflicts are influenced by their relationship to the church. I knew that the church’s influence on the black community was strong, but welcomed this frank look at how that plays out in individual lives.

In the first story “Eula” two forty-year-old women are getting ready to celebrate the last New Year’s Eve of the twentieth century. They have been friends for many years and, more recently, occasional ...