Gap Creek: A Novel by Robert Morgan – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #32

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 182012
 

Image of Gap Creek: A Novel

Gap Creek: A Novel
By Robert Morgan
Oprah Book Club® Selection #32, January 2000

Editorial Review:

Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of-the-century Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation–a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon. “Human life don’t mean a thing in this world,” she concludes. And who could blame her? “People could be born and they could suffer, and they could die, and it didn’t mean a thing…. The world was exactly like it had been and would always be, going on about its business.” For Julie, that business is hard physical labor. Fortunately, she’s fully capable of working “like a man”–splitting and hauling wood, butchering hogs, rendering lard, planting crops, and taking care of the stock. Even when Julie meets and marries handsome young Hank Richards, there’s no happily-ever-after in store. Nothing comes easy in Julie Harmon’s world, and their first year together is no exception. Continue reading »

A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #31

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 172012
 

Image of A Map of the World (Oprah's Book Club)

A Map of the World
By Jane Hamilton
Oprah Book Club® Selection #31, December 1999

Editorial Review:

In A Map of the World, appearance overwhelms reality and communal hysteria threatens common sense. Howard and Alice Goodheart, the couple at the center of Jane Hamilton’s 1994 novel, have labored mightily to create a pastoral paradise in a Wisconsin subdivision. Their 400-acre dairy farm is the last in Prairie Center, and they’re working flat out to raise their two young girls in a traditionally bucolic manner. Yet paradoxically, they strike their neighbors as unacceptably modern, and have been treated as interlopers since the day of their arrival. Howard, in love with his vocation, chooses not to believe that they’ve been frozen out. But Alice, flinty and quick to judge, finds things harder. And her job as school nurse doesn’t work wonders for her reputation either. Happily, there’s one exception to this epidemic of unfriendliness: their closest neighbors. Theresa and Dan, who also have two young daughters, function as a virtual lifeline for the embattled family.

But in June 1990, whatever idyll the Goodhearts have worked for comes to a permanent end. On a beautiful morning–marred by her 5-year-old’s tantrum but still recuperable–Alice looks forward to taking her children and Theresa’s youngest for a swim. Distracted for several minutes, she has no idea that the 2-year-old is no longer in the house: Continue reading »

Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #30

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 172012
 

Image of Vinegar Hill (P.S.)

Vinegar Hill
By A. Manette Ansay
Oprah Book Club® Selection #30, November 1999

Editorial Review:

Vinegar Hill is an appropriate address for the characters who populate A. Manette Ansay’s novel of the same name. After all, when Ellen Grier and her family return to the rural hamlet of Holly’s Field, Wisconsin, it’s not exactly a happy homecoming. Her husband, James, has been laid off from his job in Illinois. And for the moment, the family has moved in with Ellen’s in-laws, Fritz and Mary-Margaret, an unhappy pair who dislike their daughter-in-law almost as much as they despise each other:

The first time Ellen sat at this table she was twenty years old, bright-cheeked after a spring afternoon spent walking along the lakefront with James, planning their upcoming wedding. It was 1959 and she was eager to make a good impression. She didn’t know then that Mary-Margaret disliked her, that she was considered Jimmy’s mistake. Continue reading »

River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #29

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 162012
 

Image of River, Cross My Heart (Oprah's Book Club)

River, Cross My Heart
By Breena Clarke
Oprah Book Club® Selection #29, October 1999

Editorial Review:

Breena Clarke’s first novel takes place in Georgetown in 1925, where a large and close-knit African American community took shape beneath the shadow of segregation. At the center of the story is baby Clara, who is swallowed by the Potomac as her sister, Johnnie Mae, cools off in the brackish water. It’s the only place the girls can find relief–they’re banned from the new, clean swimming pool the white kids use.

After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she’ll be able to get past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes, “Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces.” Continue reading »

Tara Road by Maeve Binchy – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #28

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 142012
 

Image of Tara Road

Tara Road
By Maeve Binchy
Oprah Book Club® Selection #28, September 1999

Editorial Review:

Against all odds, two newlyweds manage to buy the house of their dreams. In 1982, property speculation is beginning to be a big, big thing in Dublin–and their street is very much in an up-and-coming part of town. “They laughed and hugged each other. Danny Lynch from the broken-down cottage in the back of beyond and Ria Johnson from the corner house in the big, shabby estate were not only living like gentry in a big Tara Road mansion, they were actually debating what style of dining table to buy.” But for its various inhabitants, the street is to become a boulevard of dreams–some broken, others created anew. Continue reading »

Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #27

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 132012
 

Image of Mother of Pearl (Oprah's Book Club)

Mother of Pearl
By Melinda Haynes
Oprah Book Club® Selection #27, June 1999

Editorial Review:

Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a black man who was orphaned as a child; 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a white girl who might as well have been. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but it soon becomes apparent in Mother of Pearl that a friendship across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town. Melinda Haynes’s remarkable debut novel begins in a hot August, when young Val’s lifelong friendship with Jackson McClain is starting to change into something more profound, and Even is falling crazy in love with Joody Two Sun, a mixed-race woman with amazing powers.
Continue reading »

White Oleander by Janet Fitch – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #26

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 112012
 

Image of White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club)

White Oleander
By Janet Fitch
Oprah Book Club® Selection #26, May 1999

Editorial Review:

Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch’s engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid’s boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes. Continue reading »

The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #25

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 102012
 

Image of The Pilot's Wife (Oprah's Book Club)

The Pilot’s Wife
By Anita Shreve
Oprah Book Club® Selection #25, March 1999

Editorial Review:

With five novels to her credit, including the acclaimed The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve now offers a skillfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot’s Wife. News of Jack Lyons’s fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness:

Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened: She felt herself to be inside of a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others … frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers and curious on-lookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form. Continue reading »

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink – Oprah Book Club Selection #24

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 092012
 

Image of The Reader (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage International)

The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
Oprah Book Club® Selection #24, February 1999

Editorial Review:

Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable…. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?” Continue reading »

Jewel by Bret Lott – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #23

 Book Reviews, Oprah's Book Club  No Responses »
Apr 092012
 

Image of Jewel (Oprah's Book Club)

Jewel
By Bret Lott
Oprah Book Club® Selection #23, January 1999

Editorial Review:

The year is 1943 and life is good for Jewel Hilburn, her husband, Leston, and their five children. Although there’s a war on, the Mississippi economy is booming, providing plenty of business for the hardworking family. And even the news that eldest son James has enlisted is mitigated by the fact that Jewel, now pushing 40, is pregnant with one last child. Her joy is slightly clouded, however, when her childhood friend Cathedral arrives at the door with a troubling prophecy: “I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, be yo’ test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel.” Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries