Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan, 2007
146 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October 2010
Nothing happens in this book, absolutely nothing—yet it's impossible to put down. I can't figure out how Stewart O'Nan pulls it off, but he surely does.
We follow Manny DeLeon through one entire day as manager of a down-at-the-heels Red Lobster. The place hasn't met its numbers lately, and Manny's corporate bosses have decided to pull the plug. Tonight's the last night. That's the basic plot—but it's a gorgeous read! A hymn to a good and decent man.
Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn
Margaret Campbell Barnes, 1949
382 pp.
September 2010
What a feast of Anne Boleyn works the last decade has offered—starting with Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl in 2001 and ending with Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower in December 2010. Type "Anne Boleyn books" into Amazon and see how many pop up on the screen. Our appetite for the doomed queen is insatiable.
Brief Gaudy Hour was there before any of them—in 1949. It's had a resurgence in popularity as of late, along with a nifty new cover. We should all look so good at 61.
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Elinor Lipman, 2003
304 pp.
May 2010
Lipman had me at the first sentence. Her writing is so polished, dialogue so hilarious, sentences crisp and pointed that I was hooked from the beginning.
Even author Richard Russo says (a bit enviously, I think) that Elinor Lipman makes "everything look easy, even to other writers who know better." That's high praise.
When You Reach Me
Rebecca Stead, 2009
208 pp.
April 2010
Here's another young adult novel that makes the leap to over to adult fiction. (See The Book Thief and The Magician's Elephant.) Rebecca Stead has taken a realistic story of school-age friendships, woven it into a mystery, and wrapped it around fantasy. It's a delightful tale for any age.
Precocious young Miranda (are child heroines ever not precocious?) lives with her single mother in Manhattan. Her favorite book, which she reads obsessively is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. It is L'Engle's subject of time travel that informs this story. Even Miranda's knot-tying hobby echoes the twisting and warping of time itself.
The Magician's Elephant
Kate DiCamillo, 2009
208 pp.
March 2010
If you don't fall in love with this little book, I'll be shocked. Written for chldren, it's a book for all ages—a lyrical fable about the possibility for goodness in a dark world. It is wonderful, charming and thoroughly engaging, no matter what age.
A magician performing his magic tricks conjures up an elephant, which crashes through the roof of the theater and lands in lap of a noblewoman. A disaster. Yet only a little earlier, a young boy had received a cryptic message that an elephant would lead him to his lost sister.