RaveUSA TodayLush and full, intertwined with tales of the families who founded the tiny (fictional) Berkshires town of Blackwell, Mass. Hoffman digs up the dirt on 250 years of Blackwell history: its settlers and interlopers, their descendants and the one cryptic constant in their lives, a garden of red earth that nourishes only red vegetation ...prose, fittingly hushed, toys with the truth of the town...in unearthing the legend of Blackwell, Hoffman taps into the story of America, ticking off often predictable milestones Forrest Gump-style ... With every chapter of the novel comes a new chapter in the town's history — and a new, if vaguely familiar, crop of characters (they're the children and grandchildren of the folks in the preceding chapters, after all). The effect is dizzying.
Joyce Maynard
PositiveUSA TodayLabor works best as a coming-of-age tale about Henry. Maynard writes from the point of view of the angsty adolescent, and compellingly so. Henry navigates his parents' divorce, his father's new family and his own fumbling attempts at romance. Labor also succeeds thanks to its tight timeline. It unravels in a fast-forwarded ending that ultimately wraps things up a little too neatly. Still, even with her contrived collision of characters, Maynard offers fresh insight into what constitutes family.
Amor Towles
RaveUSA TodayThe arc of the narrative is nothing really new: Sharp, working-class daughter of Brooklyn immigrants (25-year-old Katey Kontent) chance-meets a cartoonishly named Brahmin banker (Tinker Grey) at that great democratic equalizer — the jazz bar. Katey quickly climbs into a world where people go to college ‘in Cambridge,’ where summer is a verb — and where, it becomes clear, there's lots of tarnish amid all that monogrammed silver … But it's how Towles shades in the story that's most interesting, elegantly drawing a picture of a time and place seldom depicted in the current culture, when riders gripped straps on the elevated, when vichyssoise and Dover sole were the height of sophistication and when 'drat' and 'dame' were uttered unironically (and charmingly so).
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveUSA TodayJhumpa Lahiri has reached literary high ground with The Lowland, cultivating a story as rich as the titular terrain of the Calcutta neighborhood she profiles, where an early '70s tragedy irrevocably fractures the Mitra family — and sets in motion a lifetime of heartbreak and hope, of choices both shockingly selfish and selfless … The Lowland may sweep across generations and continents, over rivers that glint like ‘crudely bent wire,’ through historical upheaval and contemporary angst, but its tone, its language, is subtle, whisper-like and confessional. It is at its most illuminating — at its peak — in its intimacy.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
