A Word About Awards

MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2012   Date Read: July 3, 2011   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Another season, another embargoed Big Book. This one is the hotly anticipated   Mockingjay , the conclusion to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. We have had to wait along with the rest of America, as Scholastic, masters at whipping up anticipatory frenzy from their experience doling out Harry Potter books, decided to deny book reviewers our customary sneak-peek perk. As if that doesn’t make a deliberate evaluation of   Mockingjay   difficult enough, Collins has requested, in an open letter to her fans, that speed-readers “avoid sharing any spoilers, so that the conclusion of Katniss’s story can unfold for each reader the way it was meant to unfold.” What’s a book reviewer to do? A simple, “Great book—read it,” doesn’t seem quite enough, but delivering a substantive review without giving away particular story elements is something of a challenge. However, never let i

DEFENDING JACOB By William Landay   Nomination: Goodreads Finalist 2012   Date Read: April 22, 2012   From Kirkus Reviews: “Landay does the seemingly impossible by coming up with a new wrinkle in the crowded subgenre of courtroom thrillers.   Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber is called to a gruesome crime scene after Ben Rifkin, a 14-year-old boy, has been brutally stabbed in a city park. One suspect seems likely, a pedophile who lives nearby and is known to frequent the park, but suspicion turns quickly to another, much more unlikely, suspect—Andy’s son Jacob, one of Ben’s classmates. It seems Ben was not the paragon of virtue he was made out to be, for he had a mean streak and had been harassing Jacob...but is this a sufficient motive for a 14-year-old to commit murder? Some of Jacob’s fellow students post messages on Facebook suggesting he’s guilty of the crime, and Jacob also admits to having shown a “cool” knife to his friends. When Andy finds the knife, he quickly disposes

GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens   Nominations: Oprah Book Club 2010   Date Read: April 9, 2001   From Wikipedia: “Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.   The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery—poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death—and has a colorful cast of characters w

RED SORGHUM by Mo Yan   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1987   Date Read: April 23, 2003   Kirkus Reviews: “A powerful new voice on the brutal unrest of rural China in the late 20's and 30's. Mo Yan's debut novel (and first US publication) was the basis of a 1988 Oscar-nominated film. A member of the young “root-seeking” writers whose focus is the Chinese countryside, Mo Yan tells the story of three generations — simultaneously “most heroic and most bastardly” - -caught up in these turbulent years. Set in a region where the sorghum is grown, the tale's as much a family history as the story of a particular time and place — a place where the red sorghum, which “forms a glittering sea of blood and is the traditional spirit of the region,” is also a metaphor for change and loss.    The novel opens as a group of villagers led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; bu

THE PEARL by John Steinbeck   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1947   Date Read: July 10, 2001   Kirkus Reviews: “Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the ca

OF MICE & MEN by John Steinbeck   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1937   Date Read: June 30, 2001   Kirkus Reviews: “Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.  This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.”

CANNERY ROW by John Steinbeck   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1945   Date Read: October 21, 1998   Kirkus Review: “I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty — but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, — the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded — and then quit when the emergency passed. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack; their neighbors in the deserted lot; Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, docto

SIDDHARTHA by Hermann Hesse   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1922   Date Read: April 17, 2004   Kirkus Reviews:  “A serene "classic novel" about a spiritual journey through Indian mysticism -- a smooth, bland entity for a special audience by the author of Steppenwolf and winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize. This is the story of the young Brahmin, Siddhartha, and his progress from arrogant asceticism, through abandonment to the senses, rebirth of spiritual vigor, deep human grief, to an appreciation of the unity and beauty of all things, a unity in which words and thoughts appear as shadows. The style reflects this discovery of the timeless rooted in the nature of time- the author's stringent, economical phrasing with its careful rhythms lends the book an air of studied antiquity, refreshing, yet, oddly, new.”

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE by Neil Gaiman   Award: Goodreads Winner 2013   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2015   Date Read: January 10, 2016   From Kirkus Reviews: “ From one of the great masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s first novel for adults since  Anansi Boys (2005). An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood dwelling no longer stands, at the end of the road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s drawn without knowing why. Memories begin to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family, with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duck pond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark, deadly and far distant heard his dying lament and swooped closer. As

KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER by Sigrid Undset   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 2001, PEN/Translation Winner 2001   Date Read: June 2, 2011   From dust jacket: “In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty.    As a young girl, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulaussøn, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengt

DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth   Award: Goodreads Winner 2011   Date Read: April 5, 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “Cliques writ large take over in the first of a projected dystopian trilogy.   The remnant population of post-apocalyptic Chicago intended to cure civilization’s failures by structuring society into five “factions,” each dedicated to inculcating a specific virtue. When Tris, secretly a forbidden “Divergent,” has to choose her official faction in her 16th year, she rejects her selfless Abnegation upbringing for the Dauntless, admiring their reckless bravery. But the vicious initiation process reveals that her new tribe has fallen from its original ideals, and that same rot seems to be spreading… Aside from the preposterous premise, this gritty, paranoid world is built with careful details and intriguing scope. The plot clips along at an addictive pace, with steady jolts of brutal violence and swoony romance. Despite the constant assurance that Tris is courageous, clever and kind,

BIG LITTLE LIES by Liane Moriarty   Nomination: Goodreads Finalist 2014   Date Read: January 25, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “After last year’s best-selling The Husband’s Secret, Australian Moriarty brings the edginess of her less-known The Hypnotist’s Love Story (2012) to bear in this darkly comic mystery surrounding a disastrous parents' night at an elementary school fundraiser.   Thanks to strong cocktails and a lack of appetizers, Pirriwee Public’s Trivia Night turns ugly when sloshed parents in Audrey Hepburn and Elvis costumes start fights at the main entrance. To make matters worse, out on the balcony where a smaller group of parents have gathered, someone falls over the railing and dies. Was it an accident or murder? Who is the victim? And who, if anyone, is the murderer? Backtrack six months as the cast of potential victims and perps meet at kindergarten orientation and begin alliances and rivalries within the framework of domestic comedy-drama. There’s Chloe’s opinionated

THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1970 Nominations: Oprah Book Club 2000   Date Read: May 17, 2004   Kirkus Reviews: “This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garroted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lov

LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding   Award: Nobel Prize Winner 1954   Date Read: January 8, 2002   From dust jacket: “At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”  

GO SET A WATCHMAN by Harper Lee   Award: Goodreads Winner 2015   Date Read: September 5, 2015   From Kirkus Reviews: “The long-awaited, much-discussed sequel that might have been a prequel—and that makes tolerably good company for its classic predecessor.   It’s not To Kill a Mockingbird, and it too often reads like a first draft, but Lee’s story nonetheless has weight and gravity. Scout—that is, Miss Jean Louise Finch—has been living in New York for years. As the story opens, she’s on the way back to Maycomb, Alabama, wearing “gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers,” an outfit calculated to offend her prim and proper aunt. The time is pre-Kennedy; in an early sighting, Atticus Finch, square-jawed crusader for justice, is glaring at a book about Alger Hiss. But is Atticus really on the side of justice? As Scout wanders from porch to porch and parlor to parlor on both the black and white sides of the tracks, she hears stories that complicate her—and our—underst

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy   Nomination: Dublin Finalist 2007   Date Read: October 4, 2008   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy:  Cities of the Plain , 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative. It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great  Blood Meridian  (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absco

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Award: Nobel Prize 1967 Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1970, Oprah Book Club 2004   Date Read: April 23, 2005   Kirkus Reviews: “Those (guessably not the general reader) who do not find the labyrinthine configurations of Señor Garcia-Marquez's mighty myth impregnable, and at times interminable, will be rewarded by this story of one hundred years and six generations in the peaceful, primal and ageless world of Macondo.   This is where his earlier No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968) took place and it also features the same Buendia clan and its Colonel, a figure of dauntless energy and pride and stamina who carries on 32 small wars and fathers 17 sons by 17 wives. The Buendias are, for more direct purposes of identification, deliberately inseparable by name (and impulse—incest abounds) in spite of the helpful family tree frontispiece. At a rough count there are four Arcadios from the sire Jose Arcadio and six

PERSUADER by Lee Child   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2005   Date Read: October 9, 2012   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Surprise tops nasty surprise when former MP Jack Reacher stalks a nemesis from the past. Child ( Without Fail , 2002) opens Reacher’s seventh case with an apparent ambush. As college student Richard Beck heads home, two men in a pickup cut off his limo, pull him out, and lob a grenade into the car, killing Beck’s bodyguards. Reacher, standing nearby, jumps into the fray, blows away the would-be abductors as well as a third man rushing onto the scene, who turns out to have been a plainclothes cop. The law never forgives cop killers, Reacher tells Beck, so off they flee to the student’s Maine family mansion. Then comes surprise #1: the ambush was meticulously staged by federal agents who want to plant Reacher inside the Beck fortress, where they want Reacher to rescue another agent who went missing in the same place a few weeks earlier. They also suspect that Beck’s father, a r

ME BEFORE YOU by Jojo Moyes   Nomination: Goodreads Finalist 2013   Date Read: November 8, 2014   From Kirkus Reviews: “A young woman finds herself while caring for an embittered quadriplegic in this second novel from British author Moyes (The Last Letter from Your Lover, 2011).   Louisa has no apparent ambitions. At 26, she lives with her working-class family (portrayed with rollicking energy) in a small English town, carries on a ho-hum relationship with her dull boyfriend and works at a local cafe. Then, the cafe closes, and she must find a job fast to ease her family’s financial stress. Enter Will Traynor, a former world traveler, ladies’ man and business tycoon who’s been a quadriplegic since a traffic accident two years ago. Will’s magistrate mother hires Louisa at a relatively hefty salary to be Will’s caregiver and keep him company for the next six months—easygoing Nathan gives him his medical care and physiotherapy—but really Will’s mother wants Louisa to watch him so he doesn

MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS by Jennine Capo   Nominations: Center For Fiction Longlist 2015   Date Read: January 19, 2016   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Lizet Ramirez, the first in her Cuban immigrant family to attend college, must learn to navigate academia’s culture of privilege alone as her family breaks apart. It's Thanksgiving Day 1999. Overwhelmed with the microaggressions inherent in being one of the few nonwhite students at an elite East Coast university, Lizet saves her work-study wages for a surprise trip home to Little Havana, Florida, to see her family. But this is also the same day that Ariel Hernandez, a 5-year-old Cuban boy who saw his mother die on a raft as they escaped to America, arrives in the state. Advocating for Ariel’s well-being quickly becomes Lizet’s mother’s raison d’être. The twin narratives play off each other in a masterful way: the battle for Ariel to remain in America echoes Lizet’s own story of the breakup of her family and her formation of identity o

MY YEAR OF REST & RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2020   Date Read: June 20, 2019   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix. Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book ( Homesick for Another World , 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provis

THE GIRLS by Emma Cline   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2016, Dublin Longlist 2018, Goodreads Finalist 2016, LA Times Finalist 2016   Date Read: March 4, 2017   From Kirkus Reviews: “An award-winning young author uses Charles Manson and his followers as the inspiration for her first novel.   Evie Boyd is in a city park the first time she sees the girls. With their bare feet and long hair and secondhand dresses they offer a vision of life beyond her suburban, upper-middle-class experience. “Like royalty in exile,” they suggest the possibility of another world, a world separate from the wreckage of her parents’ marriage, from the exacting lessons gleaned from teen magazines, from the unending effort of trying to be appealing. What 14-year-old Evie can’t see that day is that these girls aren’t any freer than she is. Shifting between the present and the summer of 1969, this novel explores the bitter dregs of 1960s counterculture. Narrating from middle age, Evie—like the reader—k

THE AGE OF MIRACLES by Karen Thompson Walker   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2014, Goodreads Finalist 2012   Date Read: July 11, 2012   From Kirkus Reviews: “In Walker’s stunning debut, a young California girl coming-of-age in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers.   Sixth-grader Julia, whose mother is a slightly neurotic former actress and whose father is an obstetrician, is living an unremarkable American middle-class childhood. She rides the school bus and takes piano lessons; she has a mild crush on a boy named Seth whose mother has cancer; she enjoys sleepovers with her best friend Hanna, who happens to be a Mormon. Then one October morning there’s a news report that scientists have discovered a slowing of the earth’s rotation, adding minutes to each day and night. After initial panic, the human tendency to adapt sets in even as the extra minutes increase into hours. Most citizens go along when the governme