Summer camp for the gifted turns out to be more fun than academic. Katrina, Isaac, Battle and Nic comprise your above average teenage group just trying to get a foothold in society’s wall. All are friends, but soon crushes develop. We can only hope who we’re crushin’ on is crushin’ on us also. It takes most of the book to find out but the story is very well woven and worth the perseverance.
High school senior Holland Jaeger has the typical teenage life. She has siblings, a Mom and Dad who love her, top percentile grades, a posse of friends, a bright future and a loving boyfriend. Holland believes with all of her heart she has her whole life flawlessly plotted out. She probably does…until she meets Cece. Out and proud transfer student Cece Goddard breezes into Holland’s life and that flawlessly plotted plan changes just a weensy bit.
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Raymond Tyler is an above average law school student, girl crazy alpha male on the rise. Raymond has everything going for him and a brighter than bright future. He's sure of himself, his goals and his direction in life. His girlfriend, Sela adores him. This all sounds so ideal and so perfect. It is a storybook until Raymond meets Kelvin. What seemed like a perfect life, a perfect future has now been put into question. The equation wasn't supposed to equal the sum of Raymond, Kelvin and Sela. Raymond is at a loss of what to do, thus he flees to New York in search of solace, answers and inner peace.
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It’s finally getting creepy in here. Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon chronicles the lives of a New England self-proclaimed college posse-- the Compassionate Dismantlers-- who take practical pranks way too far. Tess, Henry, Val/Winnie, Spencer and Suz make up the Compassionate Dismantlers but the acts they perform can hardly be described as compassionate….
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Elinor Lipman is back and in top giggle-inducing form in her newest satire, The Family Man. I might like this one even better than Isabel’s Bed.
Henry Archer, in a moment of weakness, sends his ex a note of condolence after her latest husband dies, even though Henry hasn’t spoken to her in years. Henry has come out and moved on since their decades-ago marriage, but once that door’s open again, it’s not closing anytime soon. Couldn’t Henry just take a look at Denise’s prenup and keep her greedy stepsons from selling her Park Avenue apartment? And by the way, couldn’t she fix him up with just one or two of her gay friends?
Meanwhile, another door has opened. The coat-check girl at Henry’s hair stylist’s turns out to be Thalia, Denise’s daughter, whom Henry adopted and then had to give up as a toddler when Denise divorced him. Henry might have a second shot at fatherhood here.
At any rate, his tidy life is about to get pretty messy. Continue Reading…
Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing.
Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home. Sile is the airline hostess on the flight. Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other.
It’s impossible, of course. Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator. Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.
But they make tentative contact again a few weeks later. A romance of emails, phone calls, and all-too-infrequent visits ensues. Something will have to give, though, as both of them know, if they’re to have a real relationship. Continue Reading…
Anyone who grew up – as I did – devouring any and all horse-related books, from Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague and Bonnie Bryant’s The Saddle Club to Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion series and Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, will recognize themselves in the opening passage of Susan Juby's Another Kind of Cowboy: In the beginning…
There was Del Magnifico le Noir. If you didn’t know better, you might have mistaken him for a dark-blue Norco bike, but to six-year-old Alex Ford, Magnifico was a three-year-old Thoroughbred, reminiscent of the Black Stallion. Like the Black Stallion, Magnifico was given to bursts of thrilling speed, which is why Alex kept a red dog leash tied to his handlebars.
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New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey surprised many, including his wife, by his 2004 announcement that he was a "gay American." He left office three months later. It wasn't just that he'd had an affair with Golan Cipel, but that he had hired him to be New Jersey's homeland security advisor--not a tiny job in 2002--although Cipel had no particular credentials. After outcry forced McGreevey to fire Cipel, the governor found him four other jobs, which he didn't keep for long.
Eventually Cipel threatened to sue McGreevey for $50 million on sexual-harassment charges. Dina Matos McGreevey published her memoir of the experience, Silent Partner, a few months after Jim McGreevey published his, The Confession.
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Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel, Man about Town, is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis. Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
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No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
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