Massacre, killer, murder: when these words appear on a novel's first page, readers are fore-warned. And, yet, the first third of Sara Taylor's Boring Girls (2015) is a coming-of-age story. "It was becoming more and more apparent that I had been right all along. No one could truly understand me, unless they got
As a screenwriter and a playwright, it's not surprising that Tracy Barone's debut novel, Happy Family, reads like a series of scenes. Little, Brown and Company, 2016 The first unfolds on August 5, 1962. "The pregnant girl enters the Trenton Family Clinic, looking like she parted the Red Sea to get
In an interview about her bestselling debut, The Lifeboat, Charlotte Rogan states: "The best writing opens a person’s mind rather than closing it." Little, Brown and Co, 2016 Readers of Now and Again should pay attention, because her second novel is over 400 pages long and it is
Everything: isn’t that what readers look for in a book? Many authors think so. PRH - Doubleday Canada, 2015 One suggests that Everything Leads to You. Another insists that Everything Was Goodbye. (Nina LaCour and Gurjinder Basran) One begs Tell Me Everything, while another is concerned with Everything
Lynda Barry says a “happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there”. But there’s more to it, she says: “The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead.”* Doubleday Canada, 2015 If one reads a
