A Word About Awards

THE BRIGHT FOREVER by Lee Martin   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2007, Pulitzer Finalist 2006   Date Read: October 15, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Few things cause as much distress as the abduction of a little girl; second-novelist Martin ( Quakertown,  2001) milks that situation for all it’s worth in a multiply narrated story.   Katie Mackey is nine and lives with older brother Gilley and her parents in the small town of Tower Hill, Ind. The Mackeys own a glassworks, the town’s largest business, and Katie is a child of love and privilege, aglow with innocence. On the other side of the tracks is Henry Dees, a lonely bachelor and math teacher, who is Katie’s private tutor this summer of 1972. His neighbor is the equally lonely widow, Clare Mains, who has taken up with the self-styled Raymond R., a new arrival and, like Dees, victim of a grim childhood. Ray is not well liked for his know-it-all ways and synthetic folksiness, but Clare, all heart and no brains, is charmed, and marries him

THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by A.S. Byatt   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2009   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2009, Dublin Longlist 2011   Date Read: October 4, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Byatt ( A Whistling Woman , 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.   The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods’ progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists’ lives. Three of the children Olive is raising are not h