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This book is a great refuge. I love that the main character writes a short story with the same convention used in the entire book: one character experiencing 4 different branches of a story.

quickly becoming one of my favorite books

Very good. Compelling real life case histories.

So interesting. Taking a long time to read because the story spawns for me a lot of daydreams of what it would be like to live in Iran.

So interesting to read about New England in the 1950s and about this Con man of a father.

Plot gets even more horrible! Great writing though. Great characters. I don't usually form strong visuals from books but this one is different, intrusive visuals. Scared to pick it up again.

I get more alarmed and sick with every chapter.

The author might have physically typed these stories but it is obvious who moved her hands. Yep. SATAN.

I can't think of a narrator that I've felt so instantly intimate with in any book. He really pulls you in close.

I can't think of a narrator that I've felt so instantly intimate with in any book. He really pulls you in close.

I read the first four pages last night and it really hooked me. It set up such an air of mystery that I have to find out more.

I'm coming from zero knowledge of this subject so each page is a revelation. Really well done, I think. It is interesting reading the other reviews complain about the shallow take on everything but it is exactly what I need at this moment

Quickly becoming my favorite book of this genre. It is funny, gritty, suspensful noir crime fiction (with great writing).

Enjoying this book. Not the chapters from teenage girls' point of view so much, but definitely the detective and the homeless guy.

She does a crime thriller with a Sci-Fi aspect

I just read the first sentence because I was curious about what my high-schooler was reading for English class. I got hooked right away.

I am looking forward to using the phrase "store teeth"

Boy I love the dialog in this book. "You keep askin' me questions, I'll give you a handful of answers."

Texas, Tyler and the Telegraph

"But within days, Harrison fell ill. At first it seemed a bad cold, presumably caught when chilled at his inauguration. Then it turned to pneumonia. Being president, he of course received the best medical care available - perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to him."

Fascinating. Each section of this 900 page book is really just a quick summary of an entire book one should read on the subject. Most interesting is a history of the early democratic party as architected by Martin Van Buren.

Wow. I never knew the history of Oberlin college! Founded by members of Lane Theological Seminary who were protesting that institution's racial policies. Key stop on the underground railroad. Since then, a lot of presidents have left after "vitriolic clashes with students" LOL. I only knew it as producing Liz Phair

"Cincinnati on the Ohio became a meatpacking center nicknamed "Porkopolis," turning hogs into ham and lard for shipment. In 1837, two immigrant brothers-in-law, William Procter and James Gamble, formed a partnership to use some of Cincinnati's mountain of lard in making soap for market, initiating the replacement of an article of household manufacture with a mass consumer product."

"Converting corn to pork made it more efficient to transport."

Weird reading a history book written more than 50 years ago about a time more than 100 years ago. Reading about the manners in Woodrow Wilson's age is like watching Downton Abbey.
Knowing nothing about Woodrow Wilson, it is a revelation that he was head of Princeton University and a reform governor of New Jersey. All of that was summarized in about two pages. So, this isn't a biography at all.

See the seeds of the civil war in the south's immunological response to any judicial ruling that established the ability of the federal government to overrule a law passed by a state. Even when they agreed with the decision, they objected to the foundations on which the decisions were based and wanted the court to render the decision and literally not say why.

"... writing from Monticello to Senator Giles, the president criticized the judiciary at length, asserting that it was only 'the tricks of the judges' that stood between Burr and the gallows.... he repeatedly refers to the judgment of the people concerning Burr's guilt and denigrates the procedural guarantees of the law. The evidence, he told Giles, 'will satisfy the world, if not the judges, of Burr's guilt'"

His start as chief justice really felt like the first day of school. Everything is brand new, all the decisions yet to be made, everyone uniting under John Marshall's leadership.

I love how the chapter on Marshall's legal cases at the Virginia Bar open a window into this short post-colonial world. For example, he defended Angelica Barnett, a free black woman who killed a white man who invaded her home looking for escaped slaves. No black person could testify against a white person at that time, so she had to be pardoned by the Governor at the last minute. This was 1793.