‘The Hakawati’ is a plethora of tales of heroism, magic, death, victory, love, sex, redemption and lies, and just about everything else you can imagine woven into one story about one guy and his family roots. The main character travels back to his childhood home in Beirut to stand watch at his father’s death bed. He joins his sister and various family members and lifelong family friends. The time-line of the main story coincides with the feast of Ed al-Hada, a religious festival celebrated by Muslims and Druze worldwide as a commemoration of Ibrahim’s (Abraham’s) willingness to sacrifice his son, as commanded by Allah.  Read the rest »

I just finished Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is a compilation of eight short stories with the common thread being nationality - expatriate Bengali parents and Americanized children were the main character traits. So much of each story delves into the difficult between parents from another country and their americanized children.  Read the rest »

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 and her husband’s lover.  The woman seems to be in the midst of a self-image breakdown as she’s dealing with insecurity, deceit, dishonesty and manipulation from every relationship she is a part of. Read the rest »

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 is predictable and somewhat basic in the psychiatric descriptions. McGrath explores a human defense mechanism that is probably one of the scariest. Repressed Memories. Read the rest »

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 and a half with this girl, through a school year, a summer and right before her family’s move two towns away. She finds out her mom is pregnant, she may not “love” the boy as much as she originally thought, and her friend knows more about growing up than she does. Read the rest »

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 is better. Women can be CEOs, Presidents of Universities, Scientists, and Jet Engine Mechanics. Women can be anything they want to be.

On the surface, women have certainly come a long way.  What about under the surface?  Read the rest »

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 capture their interest. A new published author told me recently people are not buying her book because the book jacket looks plain, boring and low-budget.

This bothered me for three reasons: Read the rest »

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 job of telling a story that was wrapped up in a small little village that vanished and using it as a metaphor for the main character’s life. Though I realized pretty early on in the story this was what she was doing, the whole story was woven in such a way the village and the main character’s life became synonymous with each other. Read the rest »