B. Morrison's Blog, page 24

A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet

By coincidence, I read this book immediately after Rumaan Alam’s novel, so two novels in a row that imagine how the looming climate catastrophe might play out.

Here our narrator is teenaged Eve. A group of families, including hers, have taken a vacation home beside a lake. The twelve children of various ages are turned loose on their own while their parents indulge themselves. The children are so disgusted by their parents’ hedonistic antics that they refuse to acknowledge which set of adults b...

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam

This highly praised novel was my book club’s selection for this month. A well-to-do white couple vacationing in a rented home in the Hamptons with their two teenaged children hear a knock at the door late on their second night. They open to find a middle-aged black couple who say they are the owners of the house. G.H. and Ruth say that while they were out for the evening in New York City there was a massive blackout covering the whole Northeast, and they were afraid to try to return to their ap...

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

Robinson’s fourth Gilead novel is all about Jack, the impossible yet much-loved son of John Ames’s great friend the Rev. Robert Boughton. In the three previous books, Jack has been glimpsed as the prodigal child, polite and charming but a failure in the world’s eyes.

Despite Boughton’s patience and preaching, Jack cannot seem to fit in. He’s not rebellious per se, but cannot resist pilfering small items, especially those with sentimental meaning to their owners. He lies, drinks, skips church, ...

Greenglass House, by Kate Milford

Sometimes a Middle Grade (MG) book is the right remedy for the last gloomy dregs of winter. In this first of a five-book series, twelve-year-old Milo’s glee at the start of winter vacation is dashed by the surprise arrival of a guest wanting to stay at Greenglass House, a gloriously rambling inn with many stained-glass windows, which is also the home of Milo and his adoptive parents.

Part of Milo’s dismay is that the inn, which seems to cater to an inordinate number of smugglers, is usually lef...

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

Many people recommended this 2018 novel to me, and it is indeed precisely the sort of novel I enjoy. In truth, I like different kinds of novels depending on my mood and what else is going on in my life, but often what I lean toward is a serious, accomplished novel without a lot of look-at-me meta-tricks, one that uses a small frame to explore big ideas.

Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student in Vienna in 1914. The only child of a wealthy family, he is a disappointment to the parents who want ...

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jessmyn Ward

Ward’s widely praised second novel takes the reader into the lives of a black family in Mississippi. It starts with Jojo’s grandfather inviting the boy to help kill a goat as part of celebrating Jojo’s thirteenth birthday. The horror of seeing the slaughter—vividly described—makes the boy throw up.

Jojo and his baby sister Kayla are being raised by their grandparents—though their grandmother is bedridden with cancer at this time—because their father Michael is in prison for drugs and their mo...

Paris, by Edward Rutherfurd

In my virtual travels this winter I’ve most recently been in Venice; before that I was in Paris for several weeks. Rutherfurd’s book had been on my shelf for a long time, so that was a great opportunity to read it.

Like his other books that I’ve enjoyed, London and Sarum, this big book follows a handful of families from the earliest days of the city (here 1261) to the modern day (1968). The families vary: thieves, nobles, merchants, craftsmen. As they act and interact, we get to know the histor...

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones

This debut novel with an intriguing title is set in Barbados in 1984 where Lala makes a living braiding hair for tourists on the beach. She lives right there in a rickety shack with her husband Adan, a petty thief. Eight months pregnant, she strains to manage the steep, railingless stairs to their home.

When she goes into labor she struggles through the night looking for her husband. Washing up against a gate in the tourist enclave, she rings the bell, only to have Adan himself appear. As they...

Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright

With all the political turmoil here in the U.S. last week, I turned for comfort to this middle-grade novel by the author of the Melendy Quartet (The Saturdays, etc.) and one of my favorites from childhood: Gone-Away Lake.

First published in 1939 and winner of the Newbery Medal that year, Thimble Summer is the story of nine-year-old Garnet Linden who finds a silver thimble in a dried-up waterbed. She wonders if it might be magical, and indeed that night rain finally comes to her family’s drought...

The Charming Quirks of Others, by Alexander McCall Smith

I’ve been working my way through this series set in Edinburgh featuring Isabel Dalhousie. Well, work isn’t really correct since each story is delightful. As a moral philosopher, Isabel “considers” problems and mysteries that others request her help with. Once someone has asked for her help, she believes she is morally obligated to try.

In this, the seventh entry in the series, Isabel has been asked by the wife of a trustee to help an exclusive boy’s school in their search for a new headmaster. ...