http://calitreview.com Book reviews, essays, and author interviews. Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:57:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://calitreview.com/7732 http://calitreview.com/7732#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:05:28 +0000 Julia Braun Kessler http://calitreview.com/?p=7732 http://calitreview.com/7732/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/7722 http://calitreview.com/7722#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:20:16 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=7722 A Separate Country tells the story of Confederate General John Bell Hood, who moves to New Orleans after the war and marries a Creole debutante. Hood is a haunted man who has been physically marked by the war; he has lost a leg and the use of an arm. In addition, he can only excel militarily, and his life as a businessman is a resounding failure. Nevertheless, he finds love with the young beauty Anna Marie and they have eleven children together.]]> http://calitreview.com/7722/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/7474 http://calitreview.com/7474#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:32:21 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=7474 http://calitreview.com/7474/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/7221 http://calitreview.com/7221#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:18:40 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=7221 Heavenly Creatures? There's a bit of that in here – the overheated imaginings of two girls on the edge of puberty. ]]> http://calitreview.com/7221/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6902 http://calitreview.com/6902#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:21:32 +0000 John R. Guthrie http://calitreview.com/?p=6902 http://calitreview.com/6902/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6582 http://calitreview.com/6582#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:34:09 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=6582 obstreperous—interrupts his meal. He’s unsettled by the encounter and finally realizes why. The homeless man reminds him of his childhood friend Hootie who has been confined to a mental hospital since the sixties and communicates only in single words and literary quotations.]]> http://calitreview.com/6582/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6289 http://calitreview.com/6289#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:46:01 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=6289 http://calitreview.com/6289/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6212 http://calitreview.com/6212#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:07:10 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=6212 Fables, that has captured the imaginations of so many readers. The premise of this story is clear and simple—familiar characters from fairy tales and folklore escape after an army of creatures led by the mysterious Adversary has come to conquer their home worlds. Where do all these exiled creatures go? New York City, of course. ]]> http://calitreview.com/6212/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6193 http://calitreview.com/6193#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:16:21 +0000 John R. Guthrie http://calitreview.com/?p=6193 http://calitreview.com/6193/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6119 http://calitreview.com/6119#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:20:55 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=6119 http://calitreview.com/6119/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6061 http://calitreview.com/6061#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:59:44 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=6061 Last Night in Twisted River is the work of a seasoned tale-teller, a writer who can blend his own life (a breakthrough novel on the fourth try, stints in Iowa under the tutelage of Kurt Vonnegut) with Danny's and still manage to erase himself in the process. It's the old story within a story trick, the character we thought to be a third person passive now metamorphosing into a first person active. So by the time we reach the finish, a finish that Irving ties neatly back to the beginning, Danny has provided us with an intriguing meditation on the process of fiction writing. ]]> http://calitreview.com/6061/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/6051 http://calitreview.com/6051#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:01:08 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=6051 http://calitreview.com/6051/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5894 http://calitreview.com/5894#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:46:54 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=5894 The Ghost King is a must-read for any fans of the Drizzt Do’Urden stories and a welcome read for general fantasy enthusiasts. While The Pirate King has a tighter plot and better action scenes, it’s this book that people will long remember.]]> http://calitreview.com/5894/feed 4 http://calitreview.com/5853 http://calitreview.com/5853#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:07:38 +0000 David Loftus http://calitreview.com/?p=5853 http://calitreview.com/5853/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5765 http://calitreview.com/5765#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:28:37 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=5765 Matchless was originally composed by Maguire for the radio, and the story retains a sense of immediacy which makes it a quick read. Some pages contain only a sentence or two, and Maguire has included his own “illuminations” or sketches, to illustrate the story. There’s a lovely energy to Maguire’s drawings which complements the action of the story, and he plays with light and shadow in the same way visually as he does textually. These two formatting choices make the book ideal for children, something which is not true for his other re-imaginings.]]> http://calitreview.com/5765/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5673 http://calitreview.com/5673#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:14:50 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=5673 http://calitreview.com/5673/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5515 http://calitreview.com/5515#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:08:00 +0000 Mark Fitzgerald http://calitreview.com/?p=5515 http://calitreview.com/5515/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/5468 http://calitreview.com/5468#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:19:19 +0000 John R. Guthrie http://calitreview.com/?p=5468 The Lacuna in one’s hand, to read it, is to witness and experience years of distilled effort and research. Like Diego Rivera’s murals, it is a lager-than-life work full of color, life, and movement, one executed by a masterful artist at the height of her creative powers.]]> http://calitreview.com/5468/feed 2 http://calitreview.com/5394 http://calitreview.com/5394#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:46:01 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=5394 Blaze and Duma Key, the King is back. Long live the King.]]> http://calitreview.com/5394/feed 10 http://calitreview.com/5287 http://calitreview.com/5287#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:58:45 +0000 Jem Bloomfeld http://calitreview.com/?p=5287 The Scarpetta Factor is driven by the reader’s need to find out what the heroes know, as well as what the villains have done. ]]> http://calitreview.com/5287/feed 13 http://calitreview.com/5158 http://calitreview.com/5158#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:23:08 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=5158 http://calitreview.com/5158/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/5082 http://calitreview.com/5082#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:49:10 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=5082 http://calitreview.com/5082/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4920 http://calitreview.com/4920#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:35:30 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4920 The Bigness of the World, Ostlund's first collection of short stories, was good enough for the judges of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She won the prize in 2008. Deservedly so, for Ostlund has an ear, an appendage often ignored by writers in favor of the flashier eye. Alive to the subtext of the everyday, she uses flat conversations as a front for complicated back-stories...]]> http://calitreview.com/4920/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4879 http://calitreview.com/4879#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:39:49 +0000 Judith Harris http://calitreview.com/?p=4879 The Glass Room is a genuine intellectual achievement—a breath-taking story of love and its loss, of art and lost art, of wars lost and then won and lost again, of rich gentleman Jews and Jews lost to Nazi madness. His broad canvas covers the decades of Mittel-European horrors that began in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The themes are familiar, but treated in a fresh and stimulating, not to say disturbing, way. ]]> http://calitreview.com/4879/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4740 http://calitreview.com/4740#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:35:33 +0000 Ryan Van Cleave http://calitreview.com/?p=4740 http://calitreview.com/4740/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/4703 http://calitreview.com/4703#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:03:44 +0000 Rochelle Jewel Shapiro http://calitreview.com/?p=4703 http://calitreview.com/4703/feed 2 http://calitreview.com/4667 http://calitreview.com/4667#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:43:00 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4667 http://calitreview.com/4667/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4653 http://calitreview.com/4653#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:22:45 +0000 Katherine Tomlinson http://calitreview.com/?p=4653 The Big Machine is what urban fantasy looks like when it’s grown up and the writer isn’t relying on paranormal clichés to flesh out an epic tale of good versus evil. Not that you can pigeon-hole this novel—it’s a dizzying slipstream mashup of genres and memes and tropes and legends wrapped around a cross-cultural love story. This is a story that has depth, richness; a heart and a soul. Above all, it has a soul.]]> http://calitreview.com/4653/feed 0 http://calitreview.com/4639 http://calitreview.com/4639#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:10:57 +0000 Elinor Teele http://calitreview.com/?p=4639 Sing in me, Muse quotes Homer (the original one). "Jacqueline, my muse, I speak to you directly for a moment," quoth our modern man. It is no accident that Homer addresses his story to a French reporter whom he briefly met. For, in a way, his account is his own universal newspaper, an elegy to the disintegration of 20th century America, the winding down of the clock.]]> http://calitreview.com/4639/feed 1 http://calitreview.com/4591 http://calitreview.com/4591#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:19:12 +0000 Katie Cappello http://calitreview.com/?p=4591 Little Women. But it’s her similarity with another classic heroine, Nancy Drew, which really draws readers into her world.]]> http://calitreview.com/4591/feed 1