Novel Review One day in Bridger’s Wells, two cowboys came to relieve themselves of the tension of managing a herd of cattle. One of them, Art Croft, the narrator, passed the time of the ride by watching chipmunks and jays play or noticing how blue the sky is. Once they reached town, the other,...
Novel Review For years, I thought Wuthering Heights would be a love story, and I avoided reading it because of that. I have nothing against love stories, but I rarely read them. I thought it was about Heathcliff and Catherine’s love for each other. A recent trailer for a movie inspired by the novel,...
In The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, 11 years before the Great War began, Erskine Childers envisioned the preparation for a war between Great Britain and Germany that we recognize could have happened. I take it as a cautionary tale. When nations want to war with each other, they will find a...
Best known for The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, both about high society, in Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton broke script by writing about poor, rural farmers. The unnamed narrator is visiting Starkfield on a sojourn; he is an engineer planning a nearby power plant. Years after the events of the novel,...
We all know a Larry Darrell in our lives. My Larry was a community of Sixties radicals and war protestors who, shunning society expectations, migrated to Northeastern Washington State, to Onion Creek, to live as homesteaders in the modern world. I, a modern man, didn’t enjoy living among them, but my parents ran Onion...
As I often do, I learned about Don’t Look Now first as a movie. Released in 1973, it stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. A dark, enigmatic film, it had a hint, just a hint, of extrasensory prophecy. The bloody last scene shocked me to the senses. I remember little about the movie, but...
Though I read Girls Against God twice, I confess to you I don’t get it. So I am going to spend this review struggling to make sense of a novel I find nonsensical. And please know, when I say I don’t get it, I don’t mean I don’t like it, for I found it...
I cursed myself to finish every novel I begin. Sometimes, that is easy and thrilling, but over times, it becomes a chore. Operation Napoleon belongs to the latter group. But I finished the novel, and now I’m ready for my review. Here we go. When the Americans find a Nazi plane on a glacier...
I read Hallowe’en Party because of the Kenneth Branagh’s movie, A Haunting in Venice, which my research had identified as this novel the source. I have my doubts because the novel is set outside of London, rather than in Venice, it involves the killing of a thirteen-year-old girl, whereas the movie seems to people...
I read The Girl of the Sea of Cortez as a comprise. I have always been fascinated with Peter Benchley’s novel The Deep; at least, I think I will like reading it. I haven’t read it, but I saw the Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset movie, about a couple vacation in Bermuda. Being scuba...
