Naomi Novik makes old stories new again I first got hooked on Naomi Novik’s fantastic (in all senses of the word) writing with His Majesty’s Dragon, an imaginative novel whose plot could most succinctly be described as “The Napoleonic Wars, but with dragons.” That book bloomed into an eventual nine-book series; though I read allContinue reading “Fairy tales”
Category Archives: Reviews
A window into a isolated world
“The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” is Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s luminous memoir about a year of debilitating illness, with only a snail to provide companionship and comfort.
Abe Lincoln had the write stuff
From the start, he needed to overcome internal and external opposition by willful acts of self-definition, the ambitious farm boy autodidact becoming a splitter of words and ideas rather than fence rails. Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer I’m having trouble writing this review because I have so much to say. I triedContinue reading “Abe Lincoln had the write stuff”
Reality is not a linear construct
If you don’t remember something, did it really happen? Who do you believe when you’re presented with alternate versions of events that you were involved in but cannot remember for yourself? It’s a fascinating puzzle, and Tana French explores all the pieces of it in ‘The Witch Elm’.
An American Bluestocking 