Baxter Black is a former veterinarian, part-time rodeo rider and current cowboy poet. Hey Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky? is an episodic and often hilarous book about the fortunes and misfortunes of two cowboys on the rodeo circuit. If you want a book with a tight plot and a story that actully goes somewhere, you might…
Belva Plain’s novels have a movie-of-the-week quality to them, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. They remind me more of those Hallmark Hall of Fame movies than the Woman in Peril/disease-of-the-week variety that are staples today. It’s hard to say why her books have this quality, because they would not be particularly…
I know this much is true – all 897 pages of this book are incredible. By no means an easy or even pleasant read, it is simply an important read that will impel you to keep turning the pages to figure out what Wally Lamb’s inventive imagination will next devise. This book is so good…
Mountain Heather is one of those books that refuses to be pigeon-holed. According to its spine, it is fiction, but the back blurb touts a romantic angle. It was originally published last year in Great Britain under the title Grianan, which makes much more sense, since there were neither mountains nor heather anywhere to be…
Floating was the winner of the MTV fiction contest. From this we can only assume that the other 400 entries out there were worse. The book is the debut of MTV books. MTV, btw, is owned by media conglomerate Viacom, which, in turn, owns Simon & Schuster, which owns Pocket books. This, apparently, is an…
Up Island is that part of Martha’s Vineyard where the year-round residents live. It is hard to get to in the best of times, and is downright inhospitable in the winter. It is also where Atlantan Coca-Cola “company-wife” Molly Redwine is healed after her husband leaves her for a younger woman and her difficult mother…
A huge fan of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, I lost interest in John Irving when he wrote A Prayer for Owen Meany. But the buzz on his newest release, A Widow for One Year, was so good that I shelled out the big ones, and I’m thoroughly glad I…
A Girl of the Limberlost is a book that I have read over and over and over again, despite the fact that no one could call it a great book. Even I, who love it to death, have to admit it is very sweet and just a little too sentimental sometimes. So, why do I…
Drumveyn is an oddly muted novel about the rebirth of a woman after the death of her husband, and about the rebirth of her two grown children. The author juxtaposes very extreme circumstances for the three characters against a distance in the writing style. The result is that rather than feeling fully engaged in the…
I have read only one story by Elizabeth Gage. It appeared in the anthology, Unmasked, and was one of the worst stories I’ve ever read. I hated it. So it was with immense trepidation that I began reading – with a closed heart and a skeptical mind – this author’s latest effort, The Hourglass. Can…
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