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Native American culture is only a ghost of what it was before the European invasion swept across the continent. So fittingly, ghosts linger in the world of The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich’s deeply personal homage to her grandfather and the Chippewa tribe of which he was chairman. Set in 1953,…

Have you ever enjoyed a book so much that you wish you could erase your memory and read it again for the first time? I have quite a few such favorites. They’re all permanent residents of my bookshelves; old friends that I occasionally take down and visit again. Though I…

Amor Towles recently announced that his new novel, The Lincoln Highway, will be available on October 5, 2021. For those who haven’t heard of this author, I enthusiastically recommend his previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. You wouldn’t think that a story about a man living out his life in…

While reading Allen Drury’s novel Anna Hastings, I couldn’t help thinking of Helen Thomas, the longtime United Press International correspondent. A fixture at White House news conferences for many decades, she was known for asking blunt, intimidating questions at a time when the Presidential press corps was almost exclusively male.…

It’s hard to read this book without thinking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A woman’s journey into the Amazon forest to find an eccentric scientist isn’t far off the mark, and I wonder if Ann Patchett had Conrad in mind when she conceived this tale. Dr. Marina Singh, researcher…

One of the keys to successful writing is grabbing the reader’s attention right off the bat. JenJen Reviews pays homage to this truism with her feature, First Lines Friday, at https://jenjenreviews.wordpress.com/. Each week she gives the opening lines of a book to see if it gets your attention. In today’s…

There must be thousands of children’s stories I’ve never read in the many years since I outgrew that genre. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane made me realize that I can still learn something from them. Edward, a three-foot tall china rabbit, belongs to a girl named Abilene. Dandyish, vain…

Most people read novels for entertainment. It’s remarkable, though, how much you can learn from them. For example, I couldn’t speak Japanese until I read James Clavell’s Shogun. By the time I finished it, I was capable of making short, polite conversation. I knew that Battle Creek, Michigan, was famous…

How does America look through the eyes of those who didn’t grow up in it? To the immigrants of Imbolo Mbue’s first novel, it’s the Biblical land God promised the Israelites, flowing with milk and honey. Though poor and struggling, Jende and Neni Jonga are thrilled to live in a…

When I began work on Weapons of Remorse in September 2016, I knew very little about publishing. At that time, my only goal was to get the novel down on paper – literally. Ideas were burning in my head, but I had only a yellow steno pad on which to…