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I often review books from bygone eras because I admire the standards that make them classics. Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of discovering Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from 1943. Modern authors can learn a great deal about writing from this book. Though its situation is commonplace – a…

Medicus is a leisurely and entertaining novel that imagines what a doctor’s life might have been like in Roman-occupied Britain. Gaius Petreius Ruso, newly stationed with the Roman legion in Deva, is confronted with the body of a murdered girl on the same day that he takes pity on a…

Peter Straub died September 4, 2022 at age 79. For Halloween last year, I published my review of Ghost Story, my all-time favorite Straub novel. I am republishing it today for those who may have missed it. Like other horror stories, Ghost Story is couched in a claustrophobic environment of dread, suspense and terror.…

Last year I did a brief review of this book for Goodreads. Sensing that I didn’t do it justice, I decided to read it again. Intended in 1911 as a caricature of Edwardian aristocracy, Zuleika Dobson serves today as a parable of people’s blind devotion to false idols, especially self-centered…

This novel is so breathtakingly good that I’m afraid my review cannot do justice to it. In less than three hundred pages, Yaa Gyasi escorts us on a desperate journey of personal trauma and disillusionment that only a person of strong character could survive. Gifty is such a person. The…

It’s refreshing to find writers who aren’t afraid to weave their faith into their work. Too many novelists reject God as a factor in their characters’ lives, as though He exists in a separate universe.  In Trial and Error, Robert Whitlow uses the story of a small-town lawyer trying to…

David Guterson takes a long time to reveal where this story is going. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick with a rambling first-person narrative about two teenagers in the pop music and drug culture of 1970s Seattle. But knowing from two of his other books how well…

In another brilliant coup for historians, Erik Larson combines scholarship with drama to tell the story of how inventor Guglielmo Marconi cemented his success by aiding in the capture of a murder suspect. Between 1894 and 1910 two men, Marconi and physics professor Oliver Lodge, competed for the right to…

You have to admire Dostoevsky’s skill with characters. Reading Crime and Punishment, I found myself more interested in Raskolnikov’s friends and adversaries than in his senseless murder of an old pawnbroker and her sister. Their personalities dominate the story so strongly that at times you almost forget that a crime…

In Barbara Cormyn’s novel, Sophia Fairclough tells her brief life story in a straightforward confessional style that will touch anyone who knows what it’s like to be on the threshold of adulthood. With little family experience of her own, Sophia is eager to leap into marriage with a young artist,…