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Recent Reviews
Roxana Robinson
Positive The Portland Press Herald Part history, part family saga, the book peers into the cauldron of race as it simmered and flared during Reconstruction in the South ... A fascinating read, Dawson’s Fall illuminates the destructive antecedents some 150 years ago of racial tensions that remain with us today. I wished, at times, that Robinson had hewed a little less closely to fact. More invention might have given some scenes a harder edge, underlining what was so deeply at risk in the decades after the Civil War. That said, Dawson’s Fall pointedly makes the case that principles matter.
Stephen King & Owen King
Rave The Portland Press Herald Sleeping Beauties, the new tome by Stephen King and his son, Owen King, is the story of an epic, biblical day of reckoning. It is as apocryphal as the flood in Genesis and the fire of the End Times ...sentences come direct from the front pages of our times ...bares the inimitable King storyteller’s imprint ... a blunt, riotous reckoning of the sins and crimes of Adam’s sons against the daughters of Eve. Seven hundred and one pages of spellbinding story, and not a single page flags ...a rich feast of the imagination. And a timely tale. It casts the craziness of our world in a stark, lacerating light.
Maile Meloy
Rave The Portland Press Herald Meloy peels layer after psychological layer away from the veneer of each of the grown-ups, probing their weaknesses and also the issues of infidelity, race, male posturing and female rage ... Award-winning author Maile Meloy lays confident claim to the thriller domain, expands it greatly, and makes it all her own. That she makes nearly a score of characters compelling and vividly memorable is reason enough to read this book. Meloy is a consummate storyteller, and Do Not Become Alarmed will grip readers to the end.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Portland Press Herald Anything Is Possible is a stunner. It is unblinking in its psychological portrayals of a cast of characters raised in socially impaired households in a small, Northern Illinois community ... a score of major and minor characters are drawn in such rich, crisp detail that they sear the heart ... Strout strips away the false drapery of social class, revealing notions of sophistication as mere gildings of dress, manners and home décor ... Strout’s gifts as a storyteller are evocative of Edward Hopper’s captured moments of American life. Like Hopper, in Anything Is Possible, Strout leaves impressions you’ll not soon forget.
Chris Bohjalian
Rave The Portland Press Herald Bohjalian’s newest novel, The Sleepwalker, is one of his most skillfully plotted ... The little-known, dark world of somnambulism, and its unpredictable impulses, assumes a greater active role as the story progresses, beyond being simply a likely factor in Annalee’s disappearance. This is masterfully advanced throughout by the separate journal-like entries, each entry taking the reader deeper into the nether realm of uncontrollable sleepwalking. Bohjalian tells an increasingly gripping tale layered with grave moral dilemmas for those who suffer somnambulistic episodes, ratcheting the tension as their behavior takes bizarre turns.
Jonathan Lethem
Rave The Portland Press Herald Writer Jonathan Lethem takes his readers places that they wouldn’t have imagined. It is his gift and his challenge. He succeeds masterfully in his new novel ... Lethem, who lives part time in Maine, moves his men around the board of his story like a backgammon master. Things get curiouser and curiouser before Lethem’s unexpected end game. A Gambler’s Anatomy is a complex unfolding of character that revolves around games of all manner and dimensions.