Summary: Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding is a captivating work of 20th century fiction. The narrators are identical twins––Cassandra and Judith––who return home to their family’s ranch in California to celebrate Judith’s wedding. Most of the story is told from Cassandra’s point of view, revealing her fraught internal conflicts over what her sister’s imminent marriage means [...]
Summary: Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky is a fantasy novel about Laurence and Patricia, two protagonists who meet first as children and then reconnect as young adults. Laurence has a gift for inventing advanced technology, and Patricia is a witch who excels at communing with nature and channeling its power. As they struggle [...]
Summary: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a poignant and powerful piece of modern literature. The novel tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two adolescents who strike up an unlikely friendship based on a shared love of video games. As young adults, Sam and Sadie both become video game designers and discover a knack [...]
Summary: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a fictional mélange of philosophy, history, romance, and political commentary. Set in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel recounts the story of two couples struggling to find peace and connection in turbulent times. In a world where time flows forward and everything happens [...]
Summary: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a stunning and elegant work of modern fiction. Taking inspiration from an ancient novel by Antonius Diogenes that survives merely as “a few papyrus fragments” and a “ninth-century plot summary” (Author’s Note), Doerr weaves together three narrative arcs from different eras in humanity’s past, present, and future. One takes place during [...]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with [...]
I had a wonderful time losing myself in the pages of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. This clever and enthralling story swept me away in exactly the fashion one hopes a good romance will do. Niffenegger’s bonafide page-turner contains many excellent qualities: an elegant and well-executed conceit, deft characterization, and captivating writing. When it comes [...]
Sula is the first Toni Morrison novel I’ve read, but I’m certain it won’t be the last. This captivating tale of two Black girls growing up in Bottom––a hilly, early-20th-century Ohio town––left me with no questions whatsoever about why Morrison is a core member of the American literary canon. Though her characters and story are plenty [...]
What does a society desperate to escape monarchic domination do with a plucky, refined member of its extant aristocracy? In Amor Towles’s enchanting portrait of post-revolutionary Russia, the answer is to place him under permanent house arrest in The Metropol, Moscow’s most renowned hotel. He will be stripped of his titles, his luxurious lodgings, and [...]
For three summers running, I have welcomed one of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels into my life. Each has helped me rediscover the beautiful and complex ways in which emotional experience becomes simultaneously trapped and liberated by the act of articulation. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the penultimate installment in this narrative quartet, breaks new ground [...]