Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh My rating: 3 of 5 stars Emily Tesh’s World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow Duology, which begins with Silver in the Wood, is a gorgeously told novella which digs deep into legends of the fae. Her writing is reminiscent of both Guy Gavriel Kay and Robert Holdstock, and I very much found myself hearing echoes of Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series. This is a beautifully told tale of transformation and love,…
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard My rating: 1 of 5 stars For me, Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer-winning pastoral ponderings were a complete miss. Overall the writing swung from pretentious to dull, her musings entirely self-absorbed, and clearly her modern attempt to emulate Thoreau’s Walden Pond. While others may find it highly absorbing to read a person’s personal diary about life in a modern-day backwoods, for this reader there was nothing particularly insightful or inspirational….
The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji My rating: 3 of 5 stars Vassanji’s novel, The Book of Secrets, which was the recipient of the first Giller Prize, is a complex saga revolving around a diary kept by an Assistant District Commissioner in the fictitious town of Kikono, situated near the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, set around the time of WWI. The diary isn’t so much a book of secrets. Rather, it is the secrets…
The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price My rating: 5 of 5 stars I received notification of this remarkable book through a group of archeologists specializing in Scandinavian history, specifically Viking. Their praise of Neil Price’s work did not disappoint. My interest in this history pertains to a current novel in progress of my own, and certainly I’ve come away with a head bursting with all the latest…
The Green Road by Anne Enright My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is an introspective, remarkable, often poignant story about the four siblings of the Madigan family, and their mercurial, often tempestuous, aging mother, Rosaleen. Set primarily in Enright’s native country of Ireland, the narratives of the four children sometimes wander from that green island to America and Mali, carrying with them the subterranean influences of their mother’s influence….