Reviews

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a beautifully written novel in epistolary style, presented as a series of fictional letters, mostly penned by one Sybil Van Antwerp over eighty+ years. Even as a child, she wrote letters,  finding it easier…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by journalist Beth Macy is a perfect complement to my just-reviewed Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Think of Paper Girl as small-town Ohio, part 2, the contemporary, non-fiction version. Macy grew up in Urbana,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is a beautifully written novel about a fictional town in Ohio (Bonhomie), not far from Toledo.  If you’ve ever lived in a small town, it may feel like home to you. The span is immediate pre-World…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Flesh by Hungarian-British author David Szalay was recently announced as the winner of the 2025 Booker Award. Although the Booker board called it “a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unraveled by a series of events beyond his…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin was published in 1982 and was recently discovered by a friend, who recommended it to me. It is a well-drawn portrait of the Solo-Miller family, an affluent New York family steeped in tradition and guided…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Two weeks ago, I had knee replacement surgery, so my posting will be limited through the rest of the month. Here’s a great big book to hold you over in the interim. Meanwhile, happy holidays – yes, all…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Granddaughter is a pretty straightforward novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins. The time is contemporary Germany, and Berlin book store owner Kaspar comes home to find wife Birgit dead in the bathtub, apparently by drowning.  They…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin is a spellbinding deep dive into the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties, the amassing of wealth and wild stock…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Remembering & forgetting: a memoir and other pieces of my life by Miriam Spiegel Raskin is a short but impactful book by a woman who, in 1939, at the age of eight, fled Germany with her parents, Julius and Fannie Spiegel,…