Fiction book reviews archive | Page 66 of 452

by David Sinclair

Larry McMurtry’s newest novel, Duane’s Depressed, concludes the story begun with The Last Picture Show and continued through Texasville. In this final installment, Duane Moore is 62 and strangely uncomfortable with life, Sonny Crawford is dying, and Jacy Farrow is five years dead, the victim of an Alaskan plane crash.

As the book opens, Duane parks his pickup under the carport, hides the keys in a chipped coffee mug, and begins to walk everywhere he goes. His family and neighbors immediately assume that he’s either crazy or depressed. Karla, his wife of 40 years, suspects another woman may be involved in this sudden and unexpected change of lifestyle. She grows more concerned when Duane exhibits a distinct preference for living by himself in an old shack on some acreage outside of town.

Duane develops an overwhelming desire to simplify his life, to stop wading through clutter, to be beyond questions, speculations, marriage, business, all of it. He walks away from the life he has led to see what he can find.

Duane admires an orderly display of tools at a local store, seeing in it a counterpoint to his own cluttered carport, and, indeed, his over-complicated life. The tool display was built by the shopkeeper’s daughter, Dr. Honor Carmichael, a psychiatrist in a larger nearby city. Duane begins to see the doctor, and she becomes the vehicle for his growth. Duane pares his life down to essentials. He gardens, walks, and, at the suggestion of Dr. Carmichael, reads Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past for a few hours each day. When he finishes the three volumes, he is not sure that he understands the novel. His final visits with Dr. Carmichael reveal her reasons for insisting that he read Proust, as well as her initial diagnosis of the feelings that led him to park his truck and start walking.

As always, McMurtry is excellent with the interplay between men and women. Duane’s Depressed is a book in tune not only with the others in this trilogy, but also with Leaving Cheyenne, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove. Honor Carmichael joins a long line of wonderful McMurtry women.

This final chapter in what McMurtry privately calls the Archer City trilogy proves him to be a mature and reflective artist, at peace with both his characters and himself.

David Sinclair is a former English Literature teacher and reviewer in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Larry McMurtry's newest novel, Duane's Depressed, concludes the story begun with The Last Picture Show and continued through Texasville. In this final installment, Duane Moore is 62 and strangely uncomfortable with life, Sonny Crawford is dying, and Jacy Farrow is five years dead, the victim…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Small World

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

In the July 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, an editorial urged “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” It’s believed to be the first time the expression “manifest destiny,” a staple of high school history papers for over a century, ever appeared in print.

The phrase doesn’t show up as such in Jonathan Evison’s epic seventh novel, Small World, but its presence—and its role within American immigrants’ and Native Americans’ destinies, spread across three centuries—is woven into every page.

There’s Amtrak executive Jenny, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a Chinese immigrant and forty-niner who parlayed his gold into intergenerational wealth; budding basketball player Malik, son of a single mother and descendant of an enslaved man; abuse survivor Laila, whose Miwok ancestor internalized white people’s cruelty; and retiring train conductor Walter, whose Irish forebear was on the crew that drove the golden spike that connected America’s coasts by rail in 1869.

In fact, it’s Walter’s 2019 train crash that kicks off the odyssey, as the engineer tries to imagine the lives of his passengers and “what circumstances, what decisions, had delivered them all to that moment.”

As Evison tells the tale of America through immigrants’, Native Americans’ and their descendants’ eyes, readers are treated to seemingly unrelated vignettes that jump back and forth across time and space. Piece by piece, Evison successfully corrals this sprawling history into a cohesive whole, coalescing it into a vivid mosaic.

Part of the reason this 480-page book seems like a novel half its girth is Evison’s ability to drop the reader into a scene. You can feel the bone-rattling lurch of a wagon carrying its hidden human cargo to freedom. You can smell the pinewoods as a young couple seeks a place to build their nest in the Sierra foothills. You can taste the congealed oats at a Dickensian orphanage. You can revel in the dreams of a young athlete on the verge of greatness.

Throughout it all, Evison underscores a sense of a shared America, not so much in the kumbaya mythology of the melting pot but a feeling—oft-neglected these days—that we are all in this nation-building adventure together. That’s a destiny worth manifesting.

Jonathan Evison underscores a sense of a shared America, that we are all in this nation-building adventure together. That’s a destiny worth manifesting.

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Michael Sims

Syms Covington was 15 years old when he joined the crew of H.M.

S. Beagle for a journey that would change forever both his own life and humanity’s view of our place in the world. As collector and shooter and all-around assistant, young Covington accompanied Darwin throughout the five-year voyage and for two years of wrap-up work after the return to England. Recent Darwin biographer Janet Browne describes Covington as the unacknowledged shadow behind Darwin’s every triumph. Like most people who have lived on this planet, Syms Covington left little mark on history. But now his life has been impressively reclaimed from history’s notorious dustbin, in a new book by acclaimed Australian novelist and essayist Roger McDonald, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter. McDonald’s fictionalized account of Covington’s life is far more than a footnote in the Darwiniana catalog. Granted, it is an impressively researched book, rich in the tangled issues that surround Darwin and his work, especially its shock to Victorian religious sensibilities. But Mr. Darwin’s Shooter is genuinely about Syms Covington, not about Darwin. It is about his adventurous life, which happens to accompany for a time that of a man destined to become the most influential scientist of his era.

McDonald lovingly fills his story with the textures and assumptions of 19th-century life religion, work, clothes, food, even shipboard floggings. The result is a superbly imagined story of a man who embodies the era a daring, courageous, passionate man who is troubled by his own small role in the shocking changes going on about him.

When we first meet Syms Covington, he is 12 years old, the religion-drenched son of a butcher. We accompany him as he and Charles Darwin and the natural sciences grow up. We follow him into a contentious, disappointed middle age. McDonald constantly surprises. His prose is ebullient, even boisterous, grabbing the reader with language so vivid and original, alternately comic and tragic, that it reads like something out of Dickens. McDonald never falls into a dry historical tone, simply because he refuses to lose the sweaty, angry, sad, violent reality of life.

Mr. Darwin’s Shooter is not merely a historical novel. It is a serious novel that happens to take place in a time before our own.

Syms Covington was 15 years old when he joined the crew of H.M.

S. Beagle for a journey that would change forever both his own life and humanity's view of our place in the world. As collector and shooter and all-around assistant, young Covington…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The Fortune Men

Review by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

In 1952, a young Somali sailor named Mahmood Mattan was arrested for the murder of a Jewish shopkeeper in Cardiff, Wales, a crime he did not commit but nonetheless was convicted of and hanged for. This true story is the inspiration behind Nadifa Mohamed’s masterful Booker Prize short-listed novel, The Fortune Men, a powerful evocation of one man’s life and a harrowing tale of racial injustice.

In the 1950s, the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff is a multiracial, multilingual community of Somalis, Arabs, Jews, West Indians and West Africans. It’s also the home of Mattan, his Welsh wife and their three sons. When Violet Volacki is stabbed in her shop, her sister, Diana, thinks she sees a Somali at the door. A gambler and petty thief, Mattan tries to ignore the tidal wave of suspicion flowing from the police, his landlord, even the men at his mosque. But he grossly underestimates the racism of the local community, which wants to punish not only him but also his wife for marrying an African immigrant. Mattan’s protestations of innocence and his belief in the British justice system are no match for the prosecution’s fabricated testimonies and false witness statements.

Mohamed brilliantly re-creates Tiger Bay’s bustling world of racetracks, milk bars and rooming houses, filled with diverse characters who range from the bigoted detectives to the sheikh from the local mosque. Part of the novel is told by Diana, whose family immigrated to England to escape antisemitic violence in Russia and who never names Mattan as the man she saw, despite pressure from police. The Fortune Men is a reminder of a particularly egregious example of injustice and prejudice, but by including Diana’s point of view, Mohamed suggests that Mattan’s experience is not an isolated incident but one that was and is repeated wherever systemic racism exists.

In the real-world case, after decades of campaigning by his family and the wider Somali community, Mattan was exonerated. His name was cleared almost 50 years after his death, and the wrongful conviction and execution was the first miscarriage of justice ever rectified by the British courts. But these events happened decades after the action in Mohamed’s novel. She instead focuses on Mattan’s childhood in Hargeisa, his globetrotting years with the merchant navy and his final weeks in a Welsh jail, where a renewal of faith leads to a new assessment of life. Mohamed’s command of both Mattan’s place in the historical record and the intimate details of his life makes for a remarkable novel.

A true story inspired Nadifa Mohamed’s masterful novel, a powerful evocation of one man’s life and a harrowing tale of racial injustice.

Audio, Fiction

Fiction Audio

The Lincoln Highway

Review by Deborah Mason

by Deborah Mason

Filled with humor, misadventures, triumphs and sorrow, Amor Towles’ novel The Lincoln Highway (16.5 hours) follows Emmet Watson, his kid brother, Billy, and their friends Duchess and Woolly on an epic road trip from Nebraska to New York.

Each chapter is told from a different point of view, and Edoardo Ballerini narrates as all but two of the characters. He brings nuance to each voice, but his reading of Billy’s perspective is especially convincing. Billy, the precocious child who inspires much of the novel’s action, runs the risk of becoming more symbol than character, but Ballerini captures the wistfulness and vulnerability of a young boy far from home. Marin Ireland is gloriously brassy and brittle as Sally, a sassy Penelope figure who refuses to stay home, and Dion Graham imbues Ulysses, a homeless African American veteran doomed to crisscross America, with weary dignity and courage.

Sometimes, audiobooks merely narrate the original text. In this case, the performances by Ballerini, Ireland and Graham augment it, giving The Lincoln Highway increased complexity and humanity.

Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘The Lincoln Highway.’

Narration by Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland and Dion Graham augment Amor Towles’ text, giving The Lincoln Highway increased complexity and humanity.

Audio, Fiction, Western

Fiction Audio Western

Heresy

Review by Anna Zeitlin

by Anna Zeitlin

The new audiobook of Melissa Lenhardt’s groundbreaking 2018 novel, Heresy (14 hours), will transport you to the Old West of the 1870s through stellar performances from a diverse cast. Telling the tale of a gang of female bandits, the seasoned group of seven narrators (Barrie Kreinik, Bailey Carr, Ella Turenne, Nikki Massoud, Natalie Naudus, Imani Jade Powers and James Fouhey) brings their characters to life, whether reading from the journals of gang leader/former aristocrat Margaret Parker or from a 1930s interview with elderly former outlaw Hattie LaCour.

If you love the action and grittiness of this genre but long for more novels about the women, people of color and Indigenous people who shaped the American West, then this is the audiobook for you. Women didn’t have many options in the Wild West, but this gang of outsiders carves their own path, taking the law into their own hands and forming strong bonds along the way.

Read our review of the print edition of ‘Heresy.’

The new audiobook of Melissa Lenhardt’s groundbreaking 2018 novel will transport you to the Old West through stellar performances from a diverse cast.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

The Anomaly

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Why are a bunch of airplane passengers being rousted by the FBI and the CIA? Their only commonality is that they were on an exceptionally turbulent flight from Paris to New York City. A few chapters into Hervé Le Tellier’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Anomaly, we learn that it’s because their plane did not land where and when it should’ve and so triggered something called Protocol 42. Furthermore, it’s not the only plane of its kind, but the other plane landed in China and the Chinese government isn’t talking.

The passengers of Air France Flight 006 are the types of people you’d expect on a transcontinental flight—or maybe you wouldn’t. There’s the wife of an Afghanistan War veteran and her young children; a brilliant and ambitious lawyer who recently married the great love of her life; a translator who wrote a novel titled The Anomaly; a rapper who dreams of jamming with Elton John; and a man who leads a double life as a reliable father and hired assassin. And of course, there’s the pilot, who finds that the mess he’s in may, ironically, give him a second chance at life.

First published in France, The Anomaly is pleasingly Gallic, with chapters weaving together comedy, melancholy, tragedy and a strand of noir. Lovers and would-be lovers have their hearts broken. The stone-cold assassin seems right out of a Jean-Pierre Melville movie. Only the children on the plane seem to take things in stride, as children often do. A battalion of scientists, government agents, philosophers and clergy members struggle to figure out what happened, but there’s simply no good explanation.

No doubt you’ll find yourself wondering how you would react if you were a passenger on Flight 006. Would you find your situation intolerable? Would you try to live with this new reality to the best of your ability? It is to Le Tellier’s credit that these questions linger long after you turn the last page.

In Hervé Le Tellier’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the passengers of Air France Flight 006 must learn to live with a life-altering situation.

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Robert Fleming

David Haynes, a novelist deserving of greater recognition, continues to examine the humor and irony to be found in the social and cultural institutions of African-American life. In his fifth novel, All American Dream Dolls, he provides a bold, striking glimpse of the fall and rise of Athena Deneen Wilkerson. Deneen is a top-flight ad exec with a seemingly perfect life, until everything derails after her beau Calvin confesses his growing attraction to men. This brutal admission occurs as the couple is headed to a long-awaited romantic getaway.

Surprisingly, Deneen survives the bitter outing and makes for the airport, feeling her heart is wounded beyond repair. She is teetering on the brink; her thoughts are unpredictable, dangerous, and manic. Where can she go before her imminent collapse? Deneen heads to her mother’s home in St. Louis and the tarnished memories of her upbringing, finding unexpected comfort in the cocoon of the old familial homestead. To save her troubled soul, she has fled the city, the fat accounts and big money of her job for the healing power of her roots.

Haynes reports Deneen’s slow unraveling with a sardonic clarity and honesty usually reserved for nonfiction, but even in these darkest nights of the spirit, there are wonderful moments of love, revelation, and discovery. His depiction of Deneen’s mother avoids the customary stereotypes of the typical black matriarch by presenting a woman molded by the unsentimental tragedies and triumphs of her long life. She is not a woman of regret or complaint, and she assists her wounded adult-child in making the first steps toward recovery.

The most hilarious sections of the novel deal with Ciara, Deneen’s younger sister in the All American Dream Dolls beauty pageant. Haynes turns the sham and pretense of the contests upside down, changing the entire affair into a crazed madcap romp worthy of anything Carl Reiner or Richard Pryor could have imagined. It’s all here, the glitz, the tawdry publicity and promotions, and the zealous stage parents.

Laughs and chuckles aside, Haynes’s All American Dream Dolls is a very sly satire poking fun at the basic elements of the highly popular girlfriend novels pioneered by Terri McMillan, while offering the flip side of how it feels to be a woman dealing with the contemporary issue of betrayal. Here, the author has converted many of the commercial themes found in the works of several leading African-American novelists into a lively, provocative story. And it’s all great fun. What a witty, nutty movie this book would make!

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams links the history of Newfoundland with the journey of protagonist Joe Smallwood, an ambitious country man whose past haunts him almost as much as his country does, and Shelagh Fielding, a reporter and satirist whose secrets reveal her as powerfully engaging. Smallwood’s life on the Brow, the poorest section of St. John’s in Newfoundland, is forever changed by his admittance to a private school and an encounter with Fielding, the quick-witted student of his sister school. A secret letter, which gets both Smallwood and Fielding expelled, plays a crucial role in their lives as they create their own journeys she as a reporter and writer, he as a socialist, then liberal, and finally a confederate supporter. Leaving Newfoundland to prove his worthiness to his father and country, Smallwood attempts to create a life in New York as a socialist, only to find that his dreams are never realized and his return to Newfoundland is inevitable. Fielding’s own secret history takes her to New York, where she too discovers the pain of lost identity. Smallwood aggressively pursues his career as a politician while ignoring the feelings of love he has for Fielding. Upon her return to Newfoundland, Fielding attempts to drown her past and abandonment of her father in alcohol. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams tells the story of many histories, one of the most clever being Johnston’s portrayal of Newfoundland, which takes on its own foreboding character. Smallwood’s tales of seal hunting, railroad unionizing, and politics depicts the history of a dark and cold continent whose inhabitants are sometimes ambivalent, uncivil, and doomed to always return to their country. Through Fielding’s funny and satirical account of Newfoundland’s history in her Condensed History of Newfoundland, Johnston portrays the irony of Newfoundland’s history. Coincidental encounters, words never spoken, and human frailty characterize what is perhaps the most engaging story Johnston tells, that is, the history of Smallwood’s relationship with Fielding. It is through the slow unraveling of this history that we are endeared to Smallwood and Fielding as they discover their failings, their connections to their colony, and the true nature of their relationship. Thankfully, Johnston tells of these histories through a language that is profound, often funny, sometimes ironic, all of which contribute to the page-turning quality of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Ginny Bess is a reviewer in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams links the history of Newfoundland with the journey of protagonist Joe Smallwood, an ambitious country man whose past haunts him almost as much as his country does, and Shelagh Fielding, a reporter and satirist whose secrets reveal her…

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Honor

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

At age 14, Smita Agarwal and her family were forced to leave Mumbai after a horrifying incident of religious persecution. They immigrated to Ohio, and now, 20 years later, Smita has grown up to become a world-traveling journalist who writes about gender issues. As Thrity Umrigar’s Honor opens, Smita is asked to cover an assignment in Mumbai—“the one place she had spent her entire adult life avoiding.” Readers will find themselves completely immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of India, a place that Smita acknowledges can be “cosmopolitan, sophisticated, but also resolutely out of step with the world.”

Similar to her central character, bestselling author Umrigar grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and immigrated to the United States at age 21. Ever since, she’s been writing “to make sense of the world and to make sense of my own, often contradictory emotions and feelings.” In this spirit, Honor is a multifaceted examination of Smita’s love-hate relationship with her native country, a place that fills her heart yet is besieged with assaults on women. As one character comments, “We Indians are in the Dark Ages when it comes to the treatment of women.”

That issue is thoroughly explored through the lens of Smita’s assignment: the case of Meena, a Hindu woman suing her brothers after they killed her Muslim husband and then burned and disfigured her. Smita travels to Meena’s remote village and befriends the impoverished woman and her toddler daughter. She interviews the brothers, the police and the village chief, who emboldened Meena’s brothers to commit their atrocities. While Meena and Smita live in completely different worlds, Smita increasingly realizes the parallels in their lives and in the ways they have been treated as Indian women.

Throughout the novel, Smita is escorted by a wealthy single man named Mohan, who adores his country and is eager to reintroduce its glories to his charge. She is resistant, however, and their constant tug-of-war about India’s pros and cons results in a well-rounded portrait of a complicated country.

Suspense deepens as Smita and Meena await the court verdict, and there’s a horrifying aftermath that seems largely avoidable. Not surprisingly, romance develops between Smita and Mohan, and the blend of passion alongside brutality sometimes makes for an uneasy mix. Nonetheless, readers are likely to remain engaged with the story and its well-drawn characters.

Whether she’s writing about the bright lights of Mumbai or the poverty of village life, Umrigar excels at creating engaging situations and scenes. Readers will appreciate this novel’s deep understanding of the many complexities of Indian society.

Thrity Umrigar’s novel offers a well-rounded portrait of India, a place that can be “cosmopolitan, sophisticated, but also resolutely out of step with the world.”

Fiction

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Sharon Chance

The journey to finding love can sometimes take a detour. In Jo Sheppard’s case, her detour takes her all the way to Italy and back before she finds that the one she loves has been waiting for her right in her own backyard.

After spending months nursing her beloved grandfather through his final painful illness to his death, Jo receives a wondrous vision of the Virgin Mary who tells her to head to Italy to live out her dream of becoming an artist. In taking this fateful leap into the unknown, Jo must leave behind her best friend and childhood sweetheart, Jack, knowing she might lose him forever.

In Florence, Italy, Jo’s vision becomes clearer as she becomes intimate with the lives of the saints who inspire her artistic creativity. But her journey to self-realization is complicated when she meets two fellow expatriates, extraordinary young men, each of whom vie for her attention. As the lives of the three young Americans are intertwined, revelations of deep, painful secrets threaten to destroy their relationships, and soon send Jo fleeing back to the familiar shores of home.

Eventually returning to her childhood home in the Pacific Northwest, Jo reflects on her adventures in Italy and how they will affect her future. Her old boyfriend, Jack, is tentatively back in the picture, but will he accept her for the woman she has become? And along the way, Jo learns of a side to her grandfather that she was blind to in her younger days. In her glorious debut novel, All We Know Of Love, Katie Schneider creatively interweaves the blossoming of a young woman’s self-awareness with a study of emotional life-lessons to deliver a powerful story of romance and desire. Masterfully alternating tears, laughter, and love, Schneider provides vivid studies of all her characters, ensuring they will not soon be forgotten.

With the recent intense interest in all things Italian, All We Know Of Love will be an intriguing summer read sure to leave the reader longing for nights of starlight and passion.

Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.

The journey to finding love can sometimes take a detour. In Jo Sheppard's case, her detour takes her all the way to Italy and back before she finds that the one she loves has been waiting for her right in her own backyard.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by James Webb

If the new millennium is the time of tofu and veggieburgers, then the 1940s would have to be represented by a thick, juicy T-bone steak. Life these days is cast in terms of political correctness, non-violence, and fashion from the thrift store; by contrast, the ’40s were for white men only, and you’d better have been packing some heat along with that $400 suit and fedora you were wearing.

Earl Swagger has just had the Medal of Honor bestowed on him by a beaming Harry Truman in the opening scene of Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Hot Springs. The war is over, silver jets fly in the sky, and a new invention called television is showing up in department store windows. Why then, is this Marine hero sitting in a White House bathroom pointing an auto-matic pistol to his head? The mental journey this bitter soldier makes to find inner peace is anything but peaceful. He is approached by the young, ambitious, and newly elected prosecuting attorney of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The city is lawless, run by a British born mob boss late of New York City, a hot spring of prostitution, gambling, entertainment, and booze. He’s been so successful that a certain Benjamin Bugsy Seigel is checking out his operation in hopes of transplanting the concept to an unknown desert town named Las Vegas. Earl, along with a retired FBI agent and a small group of young law enforcement officers, must take on this well entrenched and very well armed group of gangsters. Elliot Ness had it easy compared to these guys.

An experienced master of the high-testosterone thriller, Hunter does a great job of evoking the time period; the fact that the ’40s is a decade synonymous with tough guys on both sides of the law makes it easy for him. You expect his characters to be hard drinking, hard loving men’s men.

Stephen Hunter is a skilled storyteller, familiar with his settings, his characters, and his genre. If you like tough thrillers, you’ll like Hot Springs.

James Neal Webb has a gray fedora hanging on a hat rack in his living room. He hasn’t worn it in years.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Jamie Whitfield

Patricia Gaffney has done it again. In The Saving Graces, she wove characters so real you felt a part of their friendships. Now, in Circle of Three, she spins a tale about a family so genuine you will swear you know them.

Like her first novel, Circle of Three has women at its center: a grandmother, Dana; a mother, Carrie; and a daughter, Ruth. Gaffney has the women take turns telling their stories so that, chapter by chapter, the threads of their lives braid into a multi-leveled plot.

Each woman is struggling with the constraints of her generation. Dana, facing the physical frailties that come with growing old, has fought to build an illusion of the life she would like and is afraid it will somehow evaporate. Carrie, adapting to the death of a husband she did not love, is 42 and reestablishing a relationship with Jesse, a man she has loved since high school. Ruth, in the midst of teenage angst, decides the way to grow up and retaliate against her mother for being with Jesse so soon into widowhood is to get a tattoo. Each character will remind you of someone you know, someone quirky and likable, but annoying. There are men in the lives of each woman, though all but one are more observers than doers. Dana’s George barely speaks and is content to go outside and smoke in solitude. Raven, Ruth’s boyfriend, dresses like a vampire and ignores Ruth after a make-out session in the graveyard. Even Carrie’s dead husband Steve is notable only in his dying. It is Jesse who takes action, and it is because of Jesse that the circle of three is stretched almost to the breaking point.

It is in the pushing and pulling of each generation against the others that they are tied even more tightly together. The commitment they feel for each other is as much a part of them as the genes they share, and it is this commitment and shared history that provide the strength to move forward. It is also what will remind you why you continue to remain tied to your own family.

Jamie Whitfield writes from her homes in Tennessee and North Carolina.