“Go big or go home.” This is the phrase that the smart, funny, confident and fat Texas teen Willowdean Dickson uses to confront the new challenges to her self-esteem. Willowdean (her former beauty queen mother calls her “Dumplin”) certainly goes big. Willowdean has a good sense of herself, and with
Read More →As dawn breaks over the small Connecticut town where Bill Clegg’s debut fiction takes place, we learn that a tragedy has occurred. During the night, a gas leak in June Reid’s home has caused an explosion that has killed her entire family. June’s daughter was to be married later that
Read More →Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City” is a novel about two boxers from Stockton, California, but to say it’s a novel about boxing would be misleading. Very few of the novel’s 191 pages take place in the ring. Instead, it is the story of Ernie Munger, an up-and-coming boxer, and Billy Tully,
Read More →When successful New York magazine and book editor George Hodgman returns to his hometown of Paris, Missouri, for his mother’s 91st birthday, he comes to the heartbreaking realization that his once-indomitable mother has lost her driver’s license and is not really able to live independently. His planned visit of two
Read More →“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli” are the beginning words of the Marine Corps Hymn. These words make little sense until you read about the first Barbary war. It is called the Forgotten War because that is what it is — seldom referred to in the
Read More →Meet Nimona. She’s a firecracker of shape-shifting energy, so eager to prove herself she ends up causing mayhem and disaster wherever she goes. She wants to shake things up, try something new and win the day, even if it means breaking the rules. In spite of her chaotic tendencies, she’s
Read More →Colm Toibin’s book, “Brooklyn,” is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s when a young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself. Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and sister in small-town Ireland, is an aspiring bookkeeper who cannot find a job in
Read More →“Don’t Suck, Don’t Die” is a beautiful, haunting elegy to a lost friend and fellow musician. Kristen Hersh, frontrunner for the alternative rock band The Throwing Muses and author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Rat Girl,” delivers a stunning, moving portrait of her time with indie singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt. Relegated
Read More →Ruth Reichl has worked as a chef, a food writer, restaurant critic, cookbook writer, editor of Gourmet magazine and author of bestselling memoirs. “Delicious!” is her first foray into fiction. Billie Breslin has left California for New York, where she lands a job as an executive assistant to the editor
Read More →The grit is palpable in Joe Meno’s “Marvel and a Wonder.” So much so that at times I found myself forgetting that it took place in 1995 on a farm in Indiana and not out west in another century. The story starts with Jim Falls struggling to raise his grandson,
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