Arlene McKanic
Content by Arlene McKanic
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Twelve-year-old Eugene Smalls is a young man with problems. The first problem is his name. Smalls fits him, since he’s one of the smallest kids in his class.
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<B>A boy's colorful quest for knowledge</B> Why is it that stories and fables set in the Middle East have such a hold on the imagination?
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Jazz is possibly the most complex musical form devised by humans.
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Issue:
Kate Baron’s daughter Amelia is dead. She fell off the roof of her tony private school in Brooklyn.
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Lorca, the excruciatingly vulnerable protagonist of Jessica Soffer’s first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, is, like so many teenage protagonists, burdened with a coup
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Marian Anderson was arguably the greatest contralto of the last century.
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Susanna Moore’s Life of Objects reminds us that people have very different ways of reacting to even the worst sort of trauma.
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What is it like to be one of those families whose child is abducted? What is it like to be one of those families whose child is miraculously restored to them?
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The reliably prolific Jodi Picoult returns with Lone Wolf, an absorbing story about an unusual, fractured family.
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It’s hard, nowadays, to think of Iceland without thinking of a tiny island that tried—and failed—to be the financial hub of the whole world.
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After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, his coffin was placed on a train and transported from New York, where his funeral was held, to Washington, D.C., where he was to be buried in Arlington Nationa
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“Is she real?” is the question the reader asks about the strange, wild little girl at the center of Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child.
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The Kid, Sapphire’s sequel to Push, the novel on which the movie Precious was based, is a grueling book.
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At only 16 years old, Laurel Nicolson sees a person she has known as loving and gentle commit murder in cold blood.
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The title of Bebe Moore Campbell's latest novel, 72 Hour Hold, refers to the amount of time a mental patient can be involuntarily hospitalized.
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When Alice Randall’s latest novel opens, Ada Howard weighs more than 200 pounds and, frankly, she likes her “big fatness.” So does her husband of 25-plus years, the overly generou
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This year marks the 77th anniversary of America's Black History celebration, a memorial that began in 1926 as Black History Week and has since expanded into a month-long tribute to African-Amer
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The first thing that Flavia de Luce, Alan Bradley’s 11-year-old sleuth, does in his latest mystery is set a gypsy fortune teller’s tent on fire.
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Issue:
Christopher Tilghman’s latest novel, a sequel to Mason’s Retreat, has the feel of a Greek tragedy, but it’s not, quite.
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This sad book is about a man whose marriage disintegrates because he can’t say, “I love you.” And it’s a book about a woman whose marriage disintegrates because she can no l
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It is tempting, in light of Jennie Fields’ novelization of Edith Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton, to start a review that asks the reader to imagine Edith Wharton with no clothes
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Screenwriter Noah Hawley’s latest novel, it must be said, does not join the list of novels and movies about “demon seed” children who cause unspeakable mayhem.
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Katie Burrelli, the protagonist of Michelle Boyajian’s Lies of the Heart, didn’t have the most satisfying life even before the death of her husband.
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Readers who’ve seen the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will remember Katherine Ross’ portrayal of Etta Place, Robert Redford’s pretty girlfriend.
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Lillian Leyb, the heroine of Amy Bloom's latest novel, gives the appearance of a young woman who's practical to the point of a sort of animal amorality.
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A reader coming to the end of Martha Southgate’s devastating fourth novel might think, “What did the Hendersons do to deserve this?” For they are a normal American family whose me
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Bibi Chen, the wealthy entrepreneur philanthropist narrator of Amy Tan's gorgeously written, satirical and deeply humane novel Saving Fish from Drown
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Andrea Davis Pinkney celebrates the legacy of a jazz diva in Ella Fitzgerald: The Tale of a Vocal Virtuosa.
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In 1692, after the overthrow of James VII of Scotland and the installation of William and Mary on his throne, a child-sized woman, abused, malnourished and probably half-crazy, tells her story to a
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Eve, the protagonist of this beautiful, tender novel, is an artist intoxicated by colors: the way light plays with them, how they work together, how they make her feel, even by their names.
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It’s amazing how one mistake, one mistimed incident, can affect a family for decades.
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The local barbershop has long been a meeting place for African-American men to unwind, banter and give advice away from the all-seeing eyes of women.
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Even now, no one really knows what caused the atrocities known as the Salem Witch Trials. In 1692, more than 150 people—mostly women—were arrested and accused of witchery.
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Beneath the humor and attempted skullduggery of Pearl Cleage’s latest novel, Till You Hear From Me, is an undercurrent of the tensions between the old civil rights guard—th
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Set in 1886 at the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, Jenny White's beautifully written first novel revolves around the murder of an English governess and touches on so much more.
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Peter Debauer, the narrator and protagonist of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, Homecoming, is a bland sort and he knows it.
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In 1979, in the wake of Hurricane David, five toddlers were found in an abandoned boat tied to a dock in Puerto Rico.
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Driver, the ex-con anti-hero of Eric Jerome Dickey's new novel, Drive Me Crazy, claims that women have been nothing but trouble for him.
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The subject matter of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' debut novel, Getting Mother's Body, might summon comparisons to Faulkner at his most outlandish.
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Folks who think the political discourse is fraught right now might take a time machine back to the 11th-century British Isles.
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The only time this reviewer ever screamed back at her television was during an airing of David Rabe’s play Sticks and Bones.
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Lance Weller’s first novel, Wilderness, recounts the harsh world of the Civil War and its aftermath unflinchingly.
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It's outrageous that Wendy Wasserstein is dead.
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Issue:
It has been 15 years since you wrote about Precious Jones in Push. What inspired you to tell her son's story?
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A ghastly scene in Sarah Stone's fascinating first novel, The True Sources of the Nile, starkly illustrates the saying that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic.
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Modern life is rubbish and lonely, declares one of the subtitles of Zadie Smith's tumultuous new novel, The Autograph Man, and in present day England, life seems especially trashy.
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Ben Hanson, the protagonist of Patrick Somerville’s fourth novel, This Bright River, is a loser.
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There’s always a guilty pleasure in reading books full of people who are disreputable. For one thing, you have the pleasure of knowing that you’re so much better than they are.
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The famous photos of abolitionist/feminist Sojourner Truth show a dignified old lady with strong African features wearing a lace cap and an immaculate shawl.
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Set in Trinidad on the verge of its independence from England, the latest novel from American Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez begins with a deceptively nasty description of Inspector Mumsfo
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The years before the Revolutionary War were a tumultuous and fascinating time, especially in the larger cities and towns of what was to become the United States of America.
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The first thing you might wonder when you start to read Shooter, the chilling, poignant novel by Walter Dean Myers, is "Did this really happen?" With transcripts of interviews, newspaper clipp
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What if one morning your hard-working, loving, sensible father woke up and decided he wanted to run away with the circus? And then you had to tell your mother about it?
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Joyce Carol Oates must have had a ball writing The Accursed.
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Kalisha Buckhanon, a protégé of acclaimed author Sapphire, has written a vivid but be warned surpassingly sad debut novel.
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A fictionalized account of a life is a bit of a chimera. How much, you wonder, is more or less true? Where has the author taken liberties?
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Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, dealt with the sorrow and horror of the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.
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The subtitle of Revenge, Yoko Ogawa’s slender collection of stories, is “Eleven Dark Tales.” But while dark in subject matter, these tales are nearly delicate, an
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There’s a difference in the sheer, thumping stupidity practiced by men and women, Tayari Jones’ new novel seems to say, but both forms of stupidity can devastate the lives of their chil
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The first pages of Natalie Brown’s debut novel might bring a reader to groan, “Not another story about a ninny falling for her college professor!” But The Lovebird
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Let’s get the point of Laurence Gonzales’ novel out of the way right now: Lucy is about a girl who’s half human and half bonobo.
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“But Flavia can’t be dead!” this reviewer thought as she read the first page of Alan Bradley’s latest novel starring the 11-year-old sleuth-cum-toxicologist, Flavia de Luce.
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All love is ambivalent, said the playwright Tony Kushner, and ambivalence kills. The tales in Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock are full of that sentiment.
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A clever insert came with my copy of Ellen Horan’s novel. It’s a folded piece of blue notepaper, with a written request for legal representation. A respected dentist, Dr.
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Cassandra King's new novel, The Sunday Wife, a tale of a woman who doesn't belong in the place where she finds herself and the like-minded misfits she befriends, is one of those books that kee
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The book jacket of Jerome Charyn’s imagined life of Emily Dickinson depicts a demure young lady captured in a Victorian silhouette.
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Joyce Carol Oates is masterful at depicting ugliness, and the list of what is ugly in her world seems endless: the smell of unwashed flesh with its grease and pimples, overflowing trash, ill-fitting
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Let those who complain that Joyce Carol Oates writes too much be silent: even her bad stuff is interesting.
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“Regret” is the given name of the protagonist of Alan Brennert’s beautiful, sprawling novel Honolulu.
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Diane McKinney-Whetstone has made a career out of documenting the lives of ordinary African Americans, mostly women trying to get by in Philadelphia.
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Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a brok
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This reviewer was half-hoping that Flavia De Luce, the brilliant toxicologist of Alan Bradley’s delicious new mystery, would be a cheerful murderess on the other end of the age spectrum from
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Perhaps it's understandable to feel a bit ambivalent about Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In his films he was ever-smiling, never angry, always dancing, deferential even to the likes of Shirley Temple.
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Love is a kind of warfare, Ovid wrote around 3 B.
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Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant's latest novel, Far From the Tree, is about three difficult women in the Frazier family: the proud Della and her daughters, Celeste and Ronnie, who find themselves,
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ike any other institution devised by human beings, slavery had its inconsistencies.
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hose of you who read Pearl Cleage's What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day (an Oprah book club selection) will remember the protagonist's sister, Joyce Mitchell, who ran a social club of sort
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usan Perabo's first novel, The Broken Places, poses the intriguing question of whether success and celebrity can be just as damaging as great failure and obscurity.
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One of the odder things about art vs.
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Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker and protagonist of Elmore Leonard’s latest, Djibouti, is a tough girl.
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Claudia, the narrator of Sally MacLeod's Passing Strange, was born ugly, but her unfortunate face represents the most benign species of ugliness in this tragic, gorgeously written first novel.
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Paris just after the Napoleonic Wars was a thrilling place to be.
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Midnight, the eponymous protagonist of Sister Souljah's fascinating, long-awaited novel - no doubt the first of at least two parts, as it begins in mystery and ends in a cliffhanger - is a seri
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Dani Shapiro's latest novel makes this reviewer believe that children should use more care in choosing their parents.
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Eric Jerome Dickey doesn't write about the nicest people in the world, but who would you rather read about Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or Gideon, Dickey's not-quite-cold-blooded hitman and the protago
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“Are there no nice people in this book?” this reviewer wondered, even as she avidly turned the pages of Kimberla Lawson Roby’s latest novel.
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Perhaps it's best to tell the reader right off the bat that the feisty Viola Price, matriarch of Terry McMillan's latest novel A Day Late and a Dollar Short, dies halfway through the book.
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You know you’re in Fannie Flagg territory when the first thing you learn about a character is that she has a Yorkie named Princess Grace Kelly.
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You only think you know what you’re in for when Backseat Saints begins: “It was an airport gypsy who told me that I had to kill my husband.” Joshilyn Jackson&rsqu
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Truely Noonan Jr., the protagonist of Nanci Kincaid's gentle, humorous, rambling novel, Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi, is a man wandering around in a sort of fog.
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Jacqueline Woodson's impressive new book is a coming-of-age novel that readers will love.
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T. Greenwood's novel Two Rivers begins with a lynching—or does it? We learn later that the incident happens in 1968, not 1928, and in Vermont, not Mississippi.
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Nathan McCall's first novel, Them, shares its name with a 1950s sci-fi horror movie about giant ants made by radioactive fallout.
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Terry McMillan may not be the most lyrical of novelists, but she does one thing very well, and it must be the key to her success: She’s fantastic at capturing the lives of certain African-Ame
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The first thing the reader learns in Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant's engaging new novel, Better Than I Know Myself, is that one of a trio of friends is dead.
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Sisters & Husbands, the long-awaited sequel to Sisters & Lovers, opens with our heroine getting cold feet the day before her wedding.
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The most used word in Roxana Robinson's brilliant and devastating novel Cost is "unbearable" and its variants.
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The main characters in Claire Messud's new novel are awful people, but such is the writer's skill and empathy in presenting them that you stick with them anyway.
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Many people think of the Rwandan genocide as a single, inexplicable eruption of violence that came out of nowhere, and ended with close to a million people being slaughtered within a matter of weeks. Most of the victims were from an ethnic group called the Tutsi.
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Yun Ling Teoh is an angry woman—and she has every right to be.
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George Saunders is one of the masters of the difficult art of the short story.
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The subject of the beautifully written and illustrated Mansa Musa is a few years in the life of Kankan Musa, one of the greatest kings, or mansas, of 14th century Mali the African kingdom
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Issue:
Even if the reader knows the sordid history of the period just after the Civil War, it’s doubtful that anything they have read will enrage them more than Leonard Pitts’ Fre
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Readers of Huckleberry Finn might remember the scene where Jim, the runaway slave, breaks down in tears because he's worried about the wife and children he's left behind.
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The love of movies links three generations of African-American women in former Essence editor Martha Southgate's latest novel, Third Girl from the Left.
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Few writers today write with the empathy Diane McKinney-Whetstone shows to her characters.
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By probing the mind and heart of a man in extreme old age, Walter Mosley has produced what might be his most daring novel yet.
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Tayari Jones' new novel, Leaving Atlanta, takes place in 1979, around the time of the infamous murders of African-American children in Atlanta, but this powerful new novel isn't wha
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<B>The siren's song of the street</B> Taking its cue from the brutal reality of the urban streets, Barbara Joosse's new picture book, <B>Stars in the Darkness</B>, is b
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Abraham Verghese’s first novel, Cutting for Stone, with its huge cast of characters and exotic locales—including the Bronx—has a richness that recalls Conrad or F
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Windsor Armstrong, the protagonist of Alice Randall's stellar sophomore novel Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has a problem.
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What is it with Anglo-Saxon writers and the Mediterranean? For many of them, from E.M.
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One of the lesser-known horrors of war is the way it can pervert human relationships and loyalties, whether between parents and children, teachers and students, or friends.
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Issue:
The lousy economy of recent years, like lousy economic times of any era, has the potential to give rise to engaging, compelling works of fiction.
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The catastrophes that human beings can endure - genocide, holocaust, slavery - and not only live through but thrive in spite of, is one of the more impressive things about our species.
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Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush’s unsettling novel calls to mind both And Then There Were None and Stephen King’s It.
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Ever wonder why the most irresistible novels often have the most despicable characters?
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