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Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Flipping the Pages

 Kindle has many advantages, but there is one disadvantage that drives me crazy.  I can't flip the pages.  When reading Trust by Hernan Diaz, every reader will want to flip back. Trust began with a story about a financier's life.

Then, the reader comes to Book Two.  At first, I thought I wasn't reading a novel but maybe short stories?  But Book Two refers to the same story as the one the book started with.  In Book Two, the financier hires someone to write his memoir, which he plans to use to destroy that first book, in the novel.  Ah!  Flip back to see.  

The problem is that Book One has an unflattering story of the financier's wife.  He says it wasn't true.  The secretary, who personifies the modifier, meticulous.  The secretary realizes that there's three stories.  The first book, the view point of the financier, and the woman, herself.

Interestingly, the secretary lives in her own story.  Her father is an anarchist.  He is a printer and prints out anti-government tracts.  

The memoir ends because the financier dies.  Afterwards, the secretary ties up the story of her life. 


Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Sacerdos Negativa

Via Negativa by Daniel Hornsby is a debut novel.  The title describes the major protagonist in the story, Father Dan.  Via negativa is a way of looking at God in terms of what He is not.  It is not the usual perception.  No one can get a handle on such a divine being.  Father Dan is not what you picture a priest, either.  He's kind of flaky and loosey-goosey.  IOW he's Sacerdos Negativa.

Father Dan has been retired, not his choice.  Hence, he's free.  He has always identified with the desert fathers, monks, and mysticism.  Now he has the time to experiment with asceticism with a twist.  He isn't going out to live in a cave, instead, he turns his car into a monk's cell.  This is his prayer mobile.

The book started out to be a comedy.  I laughed out loud at Father's Dan's antics.  He even picks up a coyote that was hit by a car.  He keeps it in a pet carrier, heavily sedated by feeding the coyote pills encased in spam.  Father Dan sets his leg and keeps the animal in the carrier for days, while he crosses the country.  

Tell me that's not ridiculous!  Father Dan names the coyote Bede.  Yes, named after Saint Bede, Venerable Bede, Doctor in the Church.  

Now think about it.  I think the coyote is Father Dan's alter ego. He is broken.  He isn't whole, not healthy.  The same is true of Father Dan.  The healthier Bede gets, so does Father Dan.  In the end, both are strong enough to leave their cells and go off and live.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, when Father Dan gets a gun, the laughs stop.  The comedy is dangerously close to tragedy.  Father Dan goes to kill a pedophile priest.  A runaway hides in Father Dan's trunk.  How's that look; a priest traveling with a young girl?  Father Dan's closest friend, Paul has died.  Finally, Bede bites Father Dan.

The story doesn't end there.  It actually has an "open-ended" ending.  Maybe there will be a sequel.  I hope it will be as entertaining as Via Negativa.



Monday, November 6, 2017

Love Finds You


In her new novel, Love and Other Hazards by Claudia Riess, parenting and love take on a new view. Glenda Fieldstone, impregnated by artificial insemination raises her daughter, Astrid, as a modern free spirit.  Astrid is a precocious child who understands more about sex at six than I did when I was sixteen.  But otherwise, she is just a child.
Astrid has a classmate named Meredith.  Meredith’s father is divorced.  But don’t match up the parents, yet.  There are girlfriends and lovers who add to the story.
Glenda is having an affair with her boss.  She doesn’t want to marry so this is the perfect arrangement because he is happily married.  The two of them are just in this arrangement for the good sex.  They understand and fulfill each other’s needs.

Actually, Glenda has sex with just about everybody in the story.  You would think this book is just pornography.  But the sex isn’t gratuitous.  It is actually necessary for the development of Glenda’s character.  The reader would not be able to understand Glenda as who she was, were it not for her sexual liaisons. 

Her step-father was an alcoholic and he and Glenda are estranged.  In fact, the closest person to Glenda is her cousin, who acts as Glenda’s family.  That’s it until Glenda befriends Meredith’s Dad, Eugene.  They’re just friends.  Their work throws them together; then their kids’ activities; and eventually, friendship results.

The reader will like Eugene.  The author gave him a sense of humor.  His thoughts and side comments will make you laugh. His character is very well drawn.  Glenda’s is too.  Claudia Riess descriptions are sharp.  Her diction is clear.  I enjoyed her writing and the story.


Even though I was given the book to review, I was not obligated to write a good review.  The novel itself obligated me to label it “good.”
 Claudia Riess's Web Site:
http://claudiariessbooks.com/

Claudia Riess's Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/ClaudiaRiessBooks
Claudia Riess's Twitter:
http://twitter.com/ClaudiaRiess
Claudia Riess's Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3052782.Claudia_Riess?from_search=true&search_version=service

Love and Other Hazards's Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35111698-love-and-other-hazards
Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tribute-Books-Blog-Tours/242431245775186

Love and Other Hazards's blog tour site:
https://loveandotherhazardsblogtour.blogspot.com/

Claudia Riess's Bio: 
Claudia Riess is a Vassar graduate who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker magazine and Holt, Rinehart and Winston books and has edited several art history monographs. Her first novel, “Reclining Nude,” was published by Stein and Day. Oliver Sacks, author of “Awakenings,” had said her first book was “exquisite—and delicate… a most courageous book, full of daring—a daring only possible to a passionate and pure heart.”

The author divides her time between the Hamptons and Manhattan with her husband, Bob.

Love and Other Hazards Book Summary:
Glenda Fieldston is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her seven-year-old daughter, Astrid, when Eugene Lerman comes walking by with his eight-year-old daughter, Meredith, a schoolmate of Astrid’s. The families spot each other, Glenda and Eugene engage in long-range cursory assessments, and then they go their separate ways.

But not for long. Glenda and Eugene cross paths professionally soon after, and circumstances at work bring them into close association. So begins a friendship fraught with complications. Glenda’s independence is self-imposed and fierce. Eugene’s was foisted on him by a wife who left him. Although Glenda’s and Eugene’s personal demons are incompatible, their longings are, confoundedly, in harmony. Their cautious friendship is further inhibited by past and present relationships, and it remains to be seen if they can break out of their set ways to make a break for uncharted love.

Price/Formats: $2.99 ebook, $14.95 paperback
Genre: 
Family Life, Romance
Pages: 
256
Publisher: 
River Grove
Release: 
May 10, 2017
ISBN: 
9781632991225

Amazon buy link
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P4FLK2?tag=tributebooks-20
Barnes and Noble buy link
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-and-other-hazards-claudia-riess/1126420588?ean=9781632991225

iTunes buy link
https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/book/love-and-other-hazards/id1238526584?mt=11&at=10lu5f&ct=w

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