By Leslie Vryenhoek “Ledger of the Open Hand looks at the intimate power of money and emotional debt through the eyes of a woman trying to grab hold of her own life. Beholden to a shrewd friend and burdened by family obligations and guilt, Meriel-Claire (MC) finally stumbles into what she’s been missing. She falls […]
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
By Christopher Moore | The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years — except Biff, the Messiah’s best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the […]
The Bell Jar
By Sylvia Path “The Bell Jar chronicles the breakdown of the brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful Esther Greenwood, a woman slowly going under — maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s demise with such intensity that the character’s insanity becomes completely real, even rational — as probable and […]
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“Source of legend and lyric, reference and conjecture, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is for most children pure pleasure in prose. While adults try to decipher
The Shack
by William P. Young “Mackenzie Allen Phillips’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation, and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov Lolita is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged literature professor Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze,
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett “… a first novel from Kathryn Stockett, is the story of a young white woman in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s and a group of black maids who work for the families of her friends. Stockett writes about the struggles the women face as they chafe against the written and unwritten rules […]