B. Morrison's Blog, page 4

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

 

In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meanin...

The First Ladies, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Benedict and Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, once again join forces to bring us a well-researched and fascinating story of a friendship that helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s work as First Lady of the United States is legendary; less well known is Mary McLeod Bethune’s work, which led to her being called the “First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved couple, Mary Bethune became a fearless a...

After Long Silence, by Helen Fremont

In this 1999 memoir, Helen Fremont recounts her discovery at thirty-five that everything she thought she knew about her family was wrong. Raised Roman Catholic in a small midwestern town, she knew that her parents had emigrated from Poland, but they rarely spoke about the war or the death of their own parents. Only as an adult, practicing law in Boston, did she discover that her parents were in fact Jewish and Holocaust survivors.

What a sense of betrayal, to find that your parents have been ...

Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

Subtitled In Search of a Haunted Country, this unusual book combines travelogue, literary review, and memoir. England is that country, home to nearly all of the ghost stories I grew up on and to the legends that fired my imagination as a child. Parnell sets out to revisit the ghost stories that have been meaningful to him throughout his life, and actually go to the places where they are set or were written.

I felt as though I were making this journey with him. As he takes us to these places,...

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

In this 1980 novella, the narrator revisits an incident in his past—1921 in rural Illinois, to be exact—in which tenant farmer Lloyd Wilson is murdered by his neighbor Clarence Smith. The grisly story has stayed with the narrator because he briefly became friends with the murderer’s 13-year-old son Cletus.

At the time, the two children encountered each other in the skeleton of the new home being built by the narrator’s father and began playing together. Not surpisingly, they never spoke of th...

Best Books I Read in 2024

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discu...

The Children of Green Knowe, by L. M. Boston

Seven-year-old Tolly’s father and stepmother are in Burma, so he usually spends holidays at his boarding school. However, this December he’s off to live with the great-grandmother he’s never met, traveling by train through flooded fields in East Anglia. An imaginative child, he wishes it were the Flood and his destination the Ark.

He’s not far wrong. After a perilous journey by taxi through the watery landscape, Tolly—his full name is Toseland—is saved from having to swim to the house by the ...

Reprise: The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

During the solstice season, I’m rereading this favorite series.  Here’s my earlier post about it:

This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stone...

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon

I like to read a mix of books, so this week’s review is of a middle-grade book. As the story opens, eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington has lost her beloved grandfather, whose son—her father—died some years earlier. As a result, her mother is left to manage the family’s extremely wealthy businesses. Already uptight and business-oriented, she rises to the challenge, but is determined that Dally will be trained to take over. That means tutoring in business after school, and no time f...

Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert s...