notanotherbookreview

3/29 I did this interview with Carla Sarett, novelist, short story writer and poet.  https://youtu.be/bAxQKhTz98c      at SMOL small press fair.  if you have interest. 3/4/22 A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press, 2/7/22) is an old fashioned new romance set in pre-Covid New York, Philadelphia and L.A., as a young woman finds herself.  I like Emma Roberts for the role of  Bella, a smart, funny self critical young woman overly aware of being too skinny, demanding, lazy and just weird to attract a man that she might want. She becomes a graduate student almost by default. It's the "almost" that's at issue, since Bella is a woman who doesn't yet know her own strengths. On the far side of twenty, she only knows she needs to be on a path. As the story opens, Bella's got a job she barely does and considers herself without ambition, a person who would rather watch movies all day than work. Her tolerant boss also knows she's not living up to her potential. So B...

I like Ann Patchett's novels. I loved the Magician’s Assistant and enjoyed Bel Canto. What hooks me is the grand adventure and the incredible consciousness of her heroines. These women are hyper aware of their worlds and themselves. They have irony and real humor, along with a grit that is surprising and transformative. Marina Singh in State of Wonder  is just such a creation. Honest and skeptical by nature and her training as a scientist, Marina also possesses compassion for the flaws of human kind. Painfully aware of her own, she’s glad to have repetitive work in the lab of a pharmaceutical company and the friendship of her colleague, Anders. Like her, he’s a native Minnesotan, who enjoys his safe comfortable home. Why she’s surprised he agrees, when Mr. Fox, the CEO, asks him to go to the Amazon to find the elusive Dr. Swenson.   .     The only risk in Marina’s careful life is her affair with Mr.Fox, married and old enough to be he...

THE CHAPERONE by Laura Moriarity, THE TESTAMENT OF MARY by Colm Toibin, FORGED BY FATE by Amalia Dillon explore mythic duality in women’s lives.  At first glance, these three novels would seem to have little in common. THE CHAPERONE tells the story of a fictional Wichita matron, who in 1922 chaperones fifteen year old Louise Brooks in New York City. The Testament of Mary tells the story of Christ from the viewpoint of his mother. Forged by Fate combines Norse, Greek, Hindu and Buddhist mythology in a world, where an estranged Adam and Eve must forever be apart.  Yet in each of these novels the heroines struggle to reconcile their internal understanding with the role in which they find themselves. Yet they are aware of being participants in multi-layered dramas, as the fate of the world,and personal happiness, hinges on their strength to fulfill a unique destiny.  In THE CHAPERONE, modest pleasant-looking Cora has had the luck of marrying Alan, an uncommonly h...

A “Farewell” that’s really a hello to Dorothy Parker I’m a fan of Dorothy Parker’s story, Big Blonde, though she may be better remembered for her clever quotes, “I’ve never been a millionaire but I just know I’d be darling at it.” Though her heyday was 1920’s, Parker’s wit is still fresh and inspiring. So I cheer Ellen’s Meister’s novel, which brings her ghost to the rescue of a modern literary woman. Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister (Putnam & Sons, February 2013) is a thinking woman’s fantasy. Violet Epps, fearless movie critic for a national magazine, is a hopeless wimp in her personal life, crippled with anxiety not entirely of the neurotic variety. Recently, Violet lost her sister in a car accident, as well as custody of her beloved niece. To add to the turmoil, her loser boyfriend is set to move into her house and her snarky assistant wants her job. Feeling she needs inspiration, Violet, who thinks of Parker as a kind of literary alter ego, makes a rese...

Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood, Liz Taylor…Who hasn’t watched stars of old Hollywood  and wondered what it was like to get discovered in some drugstore and become a legend?  Emma Straub’s new novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (Riverhead Books) creates an imaginary star, who’s real and immensely appealing.  While movie star biographies tend to be more tease than truth,  this fiction succeeds.  Though you know the story arc, Laura Lamont delivers the pleasure of a not always charmed Hollywood life.  And you don’t feel the vague necrophilia guilt about enjoying  a dead  star’s  glamorous life. Emma Straub’s art is to make Laura’s interior life so visceral you almost feel you’re enmeshed in her luck and misfortunes, talent and delusions.  She’s a very specific character, though a familiar American archetype.  For within Laura Lamont lives Elsa Emerson, the Wisconsin farm girl with old-fashioned values....

The Age of Madness by David Maine, Red Hen Press I first thought Regina, the darkly ironic central character in David Maine's The Age of Madness, was a chick-lit standard, the successful professional woman, who knows something's missing from her life. Almost a caricature of the type, Regina's a runner obsessed with her performance, a fervent health food consumer, a home-owner fixated on light white spaces,classical music, peace and quiet. But this Regina is a psychiatrist,  a hard-headed rationalist, a non-believer, who doesn't suffer fools easily and yet suspects she is one. Maine cracks open her facade to reveal a woman shell shocked by the simultaneous deaths of her husband and son. "Facing the facts," Regina wonders if she's the cause--the evil feminist, who forced her husband to abandon literature and become a househusband.  Was this the reason for his suicide or homicide-suicide?  She's obsessed with the question of what happened. And so are...