notanotherbookreview

Launch Oct 11th, featured in Vanity Fair's Hot Type The Watchmaker's Daughter heartbreaking and funny The Watchmaker’s Daughter  by Sonia Taitz: Extraordinary, wise, heartbreaking and funny Sonia Taitz’s  The Watchmaker’s Daughter  (McWitty Press, October) is an extraordinary memoir -- wise, heartbreaking and funny.  I love this book, which reveals the unassimilated soul behind Marjorie Morningstar, the ethnic origins of Erica Jong’s  Fear of Flying , and the ambitions that fueled Natalie Wood, another dark-haired immigrant’s daughter.  The Watchmaker’s Daughter  is about black-haired Sonia, growing up the child of Holocaust survivors in the 60’s in New York neighborhoods rough and middling.  You experience the clash between kids eager for a free American life and survivor parents, traumatized and working hard for a living. Young Sonia tries hard to reconcile her own desires with her parents’ insular world.  She also w...

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....

Wilkie Collins’ BASIL, written in 1852, is all about class I read Wilkie Collins’ second novel, BASIL, not expecting a masterpiece like the THE WOMAN IN WHITE.  Yet I liked it for its comparative brevity, urgency, and shocks.  Considered a precursor to the detective story, there are telling clues only seen as important in retrospect by Basil, the narrator.  The second son of an aristocratic family whose lineage goes back to the Norman kings, at the beginning, Basil is exiled from his privileged life to the coast of Cornwall. Heartbroken with shattered nerves, Basil writes to save his life and fears it will be forfeit before he can finish. An almost demonic force threatens him and, though you think he may be crazy, you have to read on.  The story begins with his family, particularly his father, whose pride in his ancient heritage, the conviction that virtue is based on class, is pivotal to this mystery.  How Basil ruined himself is the subject of his narrati...

The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Sonia Taitz: Extraordinary, wise, heartbreaking and funny Sonia Taitz’s The Watchmaker’s Daughter (McWitty Press, October) is an extraordinary memoir -- wise, heartbreaking and funny.  I love this book, which reveals the unassimilated soul behind Marjorie Morningstar, the ethnic origins of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying , and the ambitions that fueled Natalie Wood, another dark-haired immigrant’s daughter.  The Watchmaker’s Daughter is about black-haired Sonia, growing up the child of Holocaust survivors in the 60’s in New York neighborhoods rough and middling.  You experience the clash between kids eager for a free American life and survivor parents, traumatized and working hard for a living. Young Sonia tries hard to reconcile her own desires with her parents’ insular world.  She also wants to please and protect them and can’t imagine why Germans wanted to kill Jews. When her grandmother puts her in a harness in the playground ...

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...

American Boy by Larry Watson, August 2012, Milkweed Editions Matthew Garth, the 17 year old narrator of AMERICAN BOY, is a hard-scrabble not quite hard-boiled boy in the early 1960’s in Willow Creek, an isolated town in Minnesota. Families here have known each other for generations and newcomers, like the charismatic Dr. Dunbar, are both admired and viewed with suspicion. Raised by a struggling widow, Matt’s from the “wrong side of the tracks,” grateful for his status, as an unofficial member of the Dunbar family. And like a Dreiser hero, he knows it’s strangely provisional. His friendship with Johnny Dunbar gives him access to the luxurious Victorian house, holiday parties, but most of all to the charismatic Dr. Dunbar. When Matt’s father died, the pain of that event was muted by Dunbar, who credited him with enough intelligence to be able to understand the medical causes. Flattered that Dr. Dunbar encourages him, as a future physician, Matt considers his comfortable pl...

In my opinion GATES OF EDEN by Charles Degelman (August Harvard Square Editions) can well be compared to Gone with The Wind, in describing huge cultural and political upheaval. In GATES it's the 1960's--Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, the historical ending of the war by the most massive anti war movement in American history and its aftermath. Degelman's novel describes the war in Vietnam and the war at home, through the passionate drives and idealistic committments of a cross-section of very real characters. This ambitious novel begins with a nuclear blast seen by the boy Roger in Bronco, Texas. In Chicago, young Louis wants to go to the funeral of a black boy killed in the South. Middle class Connie, college bound, worries about her boyfriend, Eddie, a smart but poor kid bound for nowhere--or as she later learns, Vietnam. David and Madeline are New York sophisticates, privileged kids who want to make a mark, where it matters. D...