Attachment is Isabel Fonseca’s fiction debut.  This is a book about a woman who is, on the surface, pretty comfortable with her life, as a writer living on a remote island with her husband.  That is, until she finds a risque letter to her husband. This initiates a whole string of emails between the woman […]

Trauma is Patrick McGrath’s latest novel about a New York psychiatrist whose specialty is helping Vietnam Vets deal with, what is now known as, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. A common thread emerges pretty quickly that seems to effect every character - whether they are suffering from the main psychological diagnosis or not. The story […]

I had an opportunity to read The Truth (I’m a girl, I’m smart and I know everything) by Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein. This is a journal of a 10 year old girl, her parents fight about silly things, and she’s in love with a boy in her class. We go through a year […]

I used to think the Virginia Slim tag line “We’ve come a long way, Baby!” was empowering and celebrated the achievements women have made in the last hundred years in gaining equality.  Women can own property, women can vote; women can be working mothers or stay at home mothers without society telling them which path […]

I’ve been pondering book jackets for the last few months. I’ve seen more jackets in the last few months than a model for Burlington Coat Factory does in the length of a ten season contract. My reflections have more or less been about why its assumed consumers need elaborate, more complex visual aids to […]

Jackfish, The Vanishing Village is an imaginary autobiography about a woman with a traumatic past and her need for redemption. Sarah Felix Burns has masterfully written a book so eloquent in description, yet so horrifically tragic that the line between beautiful and ugliness becomes blurred in a strangely contradictory way.
Burns did such a magnificent […]