Book Reviews

• Shy Creatures: A Novel by Clare Chambers

  Washington Independent, November 12, 2024

• The Mighty Red: A Novel by Louise Erdrich

  Washington Independent, October 10, 2024

• Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories by Janice Deal

  Cleaver, September 30, 2023

• Wonder Travels: A Memoir by Josh Barkan

  New York Journal of Books, September 12, 2023

• Atalanta: A Novel by Jennifer Saint

  Washington Independent, May 30, 2023
  The Argonauts’ quest is retold through the eyes of a female warrior, with mixed results.

• The Best Novels About Life in a Haunted House by Ellen Prentiss Campbell

  Shepherd, January 2023
  The books I picked & why.

• Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay

  Washington Independent, December 9, 2022
  An exuberant if overstated ode to…well, you know.

• The Last Karankawas: A Novel by Kimberly Garza

  Washington Independent, September 15, 2022
  A diverse Galveston community grapples with turmoil on the ground and looming in the clouds.

• Mother of Strangers: A Novel by Suad Amiry

  Washington Independent, August 9, 2022
  An earnest, deeply flawed story of Palestinian suffering.

• The Fell: A Novel by Sarah Moss

  Washington Independent, March 15, 2022
  This story’s quiet start belies its propulsive finish.

• The Tenderest of Strings by Steven Schwartz

  Cleaver, Winter 2022
  A story of a marriage and a family in trouble, an exploration of how family ties constrain and sustain, stretch and snap.

• Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine: A Novel by Klara Hveberg; translated by Alison McCullough

  Washington Independent, November 25, 2021
  A challenging, complex story of mathematics and misery.

• A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery

  New York Journal of Books, September 14, 2021
  This novel offers the pleasures of a poetic travelogue and an homage to a place and culture.

• The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

  Fiction Writers Review, April 12, 2021
  The rubble of what happens is the real souvenir in these stories: memento mori, reminder not just of time gone by, but of death, always there, always approaching.

• Wild Swims by Dorothy Nors

  Fiction Writers Review, February 1, 2021
  Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.

• Beneficence By Meredith Hall

  New York Journal of Books, October 2020
  Through the experience of a fictional family, Doris and Tup Senter and their children, the author tells a powerful story of love and loss and endurance.

• Jack: A Novel By Marilynne Robinson

  Washington Independent, September 30, 2020
  Whether or not you’ve read Gilead, the author’s latest work is a balm for the soul.

• Fracture by Andrés Neuman

  Fiction Writers Review, June 15, 2020
  The novel is narrated as an episodic composite, linked by the author’s narrative conceit: a persistent Argentinian journalist has been seeking to interview elusive, reclusive Watanabe.

• Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems by Juditha Dowd

  New York Journal of Books, May 2020
  A unique book, a biography in poems of John Adams Audubon’s wife Lucy Bakewell.

• The Night Watchman: A Novel by Louise Erdrich

  Washington Independent, March 2020
  This affecting story probes the historical record for a narrative that is at once tender and hopeful.

• Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

  Fiction Writers Review, October 2019
  Olive Kittredge is a continually surprising person: blunt and gruff, but increasingly capable of both insight and empathy.

• The Dutch House: A Novel by Ann Patchett

  Washington Independent, September 2019
  Have you ever stalked a house?

• The Snakes by Sadie Jones

  Washington Independent, August 2019
  A family-drama turned thriller that coils readers in a helix of terror.

• Busara Road by David Hallock Sanders

  Fiction Writers Review, April 2019
  Captures the way a child feels like a token moved from square to square on the adult’s game board.

• Normal People: A Novel by Sally Rooney

  Washington Independent, April 2019
  A love affair beset by obstacles of class, money, and personality.

• Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

  The New York Journal of Books, February 2019
  The novel may be cool as it opens but the ending is white hot.

• The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff

  Fiction Writers Review, February 2019
  Women in action…taking on dangerous assignments.

• The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash

  Fiction Writers Review, December 2018
  A coming-of-age journey, a magical mystery tour, vintage 1980.

• Dogs of Detroit by Brad Felver

  The Washington Independent Review of Books, September 2018
  The stories are dry ice: cold enough to burn.

• Other People’s Love Affairs by D. Wystan Owen

  The New York Journal of Books, August 2018
  The prevailing tone may be quiet melancholy but it is suffused with joy.

• Everything Is Borrowed by Nathaniel Popkin

  Fiction Writers Review, June 2018
  Meditation on time and change.

• Circe by Madeline Miller

  Washington Independent Review of Books, April 2018
  Prepare for enchantment.

• The Only Story by Julian Barnes

  Fiction Writers Review, April 2018
  Suffering is, after all, the Latin root for passion.

• Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

  Fiction Writers Review, December 2017
  This book is itself in disguise, allegory camouflaged as page-turner, parable gone under-cover as spy story.

• The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

  Washington Independent Review of Books, November 2017
  Read this one as children do: with eyes and heart open, giving in, ready to be swept away.

• Larkinland by Jonathan Tulloch

  The Fiction Writers Review, October 2017
  We would all be singing different songs, telling different stories, if we belonged somewhere else.

• There Your Heart Lies by Mary Gordon

  The Fiction Writers Review, September 2017
  …fingerprints endure, and Gordon’s mark these new pages.

• What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

  The Washington Independent Review of Books, August 2017
  Clemmons knows…what it is to grieve and claw your way through.

• Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

  The Fiction Writers Review, April 2017
  Lucy’s the disturbing stone thrown into a still dark pond.

• Mexico: Stories by Josh Barkan

  The Washington Independent Review of Books, January 2017
  Dark tales of people in crisis.

• HEAT & LIGHT: A NOVEL by Jennifer Haigh

  Fiction Writers Review, September 2016
  Haigh presents no over-simplified white hats and black hats in her story.

• THE MUSE: A NOVEL BY JESSIE BURTON

  Washington Independent Review of Books, August 2016
  A dual narrative on the pains of war and the healing capacity of art.

• The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 

  Fiction Writers Review, June 2016
  No one ever has enough money.

• LaRose by Louise Erdrich

  Fiction Writers Review, May 2016
  Heartbreak mitigation in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel.

• Flora by Gail Godwin

  Washington Independent Review of Books, June 2013
  Godwin’s story lingers in the mind’s eye and ear, gently haunting the reader even after the book is closed.

• My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

  Fiction Writers Review, April 2016
  For better or worse, as Lucy Barton discovers, you can run from your mother but you can’t hide.

• Lila by Marilynne Robinson

  Fiction Writers Review, January 2015
  All of Robinson’s novels are united by her compassionate attention to the possibility for amazing, transcendent grace breaking through and illuminating flawed human existence and our daily experience.