B. Morrison's Blog, page 3

Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido

What a delight this novel is! I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “pleasure buttons:” the aspects of fiction that provide a pleasurable experience for readers. The missing one in that discussion turns out to be wit.

In Trapido’s debut novel, 18-year-old Katherine is eager to explore the world outside her mother’s petit-bourgeois bungalow, but is at first hesitant and only too aware of her own naïveté. It’s telling that in times of stress she turns to her favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma.

La...

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, so sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise.

I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

I am stunned by the gorgeous language. When Chie sees the islands of her native Japan, they look like “a trail of drying footprints...

The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman

In 1926 Tom Sherbourne becomes the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a lonely spot off the southwestern coast of Australia. It’s a lonely job, with a supply boat only visiting once a quarter, but Tom enjoys it. After a shattering four years fighting in WWI, Tom returned to Australia and began learning the lighthouse trade, attracted by the quiet life, the precision required, and the opportunity to save lives. On a rare shore leave he meets and marries Isabel who adjusts quickly to life on the...

Brave the Wild River, by Melissa L. Sevigny

Subtitled The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, this nonfiction book rescues a story, misrepresented at the time and now forgotten by all but scientists. In 1938 botanist and University of Michigan professor Elzada Clover and her student Lois Jotter set off down the—at the time—untamed Colorado River with four men in homemade boats.

The women’s goal was to survey the plant life of the Grand Canyon for the first time. Only a very few people had ridden the Col...

Lost in the Never Woods, by Aiden Thomas

In this retelling of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling lives in Astoria, Oregon, a small town where children have begun disappearing. People turn to her because she and her brothers also went missing five years earlier. She has no answers because when she did turn up in the woods, she remembered nothing of what happened. Michael and John have never returned.

When Wendy, on her eighteenth birthday, almost runs over a boy lying in the middle of a forest road, she discovers that the Peter Pan of the chil...

Northern Farm, by Henry Beston

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From the writer-naturalist author of The Outermost House, comes an invitation to share in the daily life of a farm in Maine. I found this book so comforting that I stretched it out over a couple of months, only reading one or two short chapters first thing in the day.

Looking for a quieter life than could be found in the Boston suburbs, Henry Beston and his wife, writer Elizabeth Coatsworth, moved to Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine, in the 1930s and lived there for the rest of their lives.

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A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, by Rumer Godden

In my search for comfort reads to give me a rest from what’s going on in our world, I’ve turned to Rumer Godden, whose novels are set in earlier times and places. I’m looking forward to rereading old favorites like The Greengage Summer, and in the meantime picked up this memoir of her early life. I completely ignored the note that it covers the years from her birth in 1907 to 1946, thus landing me once again in the experience of a woman at least temporarily distant from Hitler’s reign of terr...

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream h...

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins

“How very odd it must be, living at the mercy of the tide.”

Eris is a tidal island off the coast of Scotland, meaning that it can only be accessed at low tide. It is a place of crashing seas, wild storms, and dark woods where mainlanders once buried their dead to keep wolves from disturbing them.

Once the home of the reclusive artist Vanessa Chapman, now—five years after her death—the island’s only inhabitant is Grace, her friend and companion. However, Vanessa’s art and papers were left, not...

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter

Translated by Jane Degras

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria to join her husband Hermann in Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the most northern inhabited places on the planet. Hermann has been spending increasing amounts of time there, hunting and trapping, and as a result has found a new serenity. Christiane is there to stay with him for a year in a tiny hut, the s...