Malasz

Nonfiction Full and fruitful humanity PIONEER GIRL PERSPECTIVES: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal 300 pages, South Dakota Historical Society Press Reviewed by Diane Diekman This is not a book for beginners, but a collection of essays for those with a scholarly appreciation of the life and work of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It follows an earlier book, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography , which was an unexpected bestseller in 2014. Wilder’s world-famous Little House series originated from her unpublished “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, written in 1930. When the South Dakota Historical Society Press annotated and published the annotated autobiography in 2014, the 15,000-copy print run sold out in three weeks. The small press found itself with a runaway bestseller, going through eight printings and selling more than 150,000 copies in the first year.   Reporters and critics asked, “What is the appeal?” The South Dakota editors wondered, “What made Wilder and he...

On a leafy suburban street in Dublin, beautiful, poised Stella Greene lives with her successful husband, Matt. The perfect couple in every way, Stella appears to have it all. Next door, at number 72 however, lives Rea Brady. Gruff, bad-tempered and rarely seen besides the twitching of her net curtains, rumour has it she’s lost it all…including her marbles if you believe the neighbourhood gossip. But appearances can be deceiving and when Stella and Rea’s worlds collide they realise they have much in common. Both are trapped in a prison of their own making. Has help been next door without them realising it? I get very little time to read now and so I am very careful when picking a book to read, I need something that is going to pull me in from the first page and make me switch off from the hustle and bustle of every day life. When one of my favourite authors sent me a copy of her latest release The Woman at 72 Derry Lane along with a pack of tissues because this Queen of emotional writin...

Fiction Stories my mother would never tell The Ivan By Erin Eldridge 189 pp. Austin Macauley Publishers  Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo The Ivan is set in Berlin at the very end of World War Two, during the occupation of the city by Russian troops and just prior to the division of the city following formal surrender. I was drawn to this book by stories told to me by my father, stories my mother would never tell. My mother was born and lived in Vienna and went through the Nazification and then the Russian occupation of that city. She had friends and relatives who disappeared. She had a cousin who wandered back virtually catatonic from an SS unit he had been conscripted into – he was sixteen. The experiences she never would discuss are summed up well in Eldridge’s story of Elise, Erich and Valery (the Ivan), including life in the shelters and basements. They had no news of events outside of their hiding place, no way of knowing anything about the status of the final battle for Berlin. ...

Nonfiction To challenge but not bewilder LIT UP: ONE REPORTER THREE SCHOOLS. TWENTY-FOUR BOOKS THAT CAN CHANGE LIVES. By David Denby 257 pp. Henry Holt & Company Reviewed by David Daniel Journalist David Denby ( Great Books ; Do the Movies Have a Future? ) approaches this  project by posing the question: Can hormone-driven, Facebook and Instagram-addicted teens, perched between childhood and adulthood—which is to say, the mass of American high school students!—get excited about reading serious literature? Embedding himself in the classrooms of several public schools, much the way a war correspondent might dig in with combat troops, he sets out on a year-long mission to find out.  It’s not a new inquiry. This and ancillary questions about what books “reach” students, how best to teach them, how to measure outcomes, etc., are examined daily in classrooms and staff rooms, in faculty lounges and in after school pubs. These discussions—like discussions about many vital issues—r...

The girls of the Roanoke family - beautiful, rich, mysterious - seem to have it all. But there's a dark truth about them that's never spoken. Lane is one of the lucky ones. When she was fifteen, over one long, hot summer at her grandparents' estate in rural Kansas, she found out what it really means to be a Roanoke girl. Lane ran, far and fast. Until eleven years later, when her cousin Allegra goes missing - and Lane has no choice but to go back. She is a Roanoke girl. Is she strong enough to escape a second time? This is going to be a hard review for me to write as my thoughts on this book are so mixed. I don’t want to give too much away but the main plot focuses on a form of sexual abuse that has never sat comfortable with me and as soon as it was revealed in this book I was unsure whether to carry on with the book but on the other hand the authors writing style flows so effortlessly and she gets straight to the point without drawing the storyline out unnecessarily which ...

Fiction
 The petty and profound THE GRAYBAR HOTEL: 
STORIES 
 By Curtis Dawkins 
224 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Who would imagine that a murderer serving life without parole would have an MFA in writing and create masterful short stories? Not I, that’s for sure, but this is exactly who Curtis Dawkins is. His new collection of 14 short stories, The Graybar Hotel , destroys other assumptions about prisoners and prison as well.  This funny, sad, heartwarming and just plain astonishing book is Dawkins’ first published collection. He has published essays and shorts previously in several literary magazines where his publisher discovered his short stories.   It’s unclear how many of these are autobiographical; they take us from the beginning of incarceration—jail—to a court trial, the judge speaking to a defendant via closed-circuit TV, a bus transfer to a Michigan state prison, and then a life inside. We know from the acknowledgments at the back of the book that D...

Verity Love – Jane Austen fangirl and an introvert in a world of extroverts – is perfectly happy on her own (thank you very much), and her fictional boyfriend Peter is very useful for getting her out of unwanted social events. But when a case of mistaken identity forces her to introduce a perfect stranger as her boyfriend, Verity’s life suddenly becomes much more complicated. Johnny could also use a fictional girlfriend. Against Verity’s better judgement, he persuades her to partner up for a summer season of weddings, big number birthdays and garden parties, with just one promise - not to fall in love with each other… The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts was one of my top reads of 2016 and I have found it impossible to let Posy and her quaint little Bookshop go so I was over the moon when I found out that Annie Darling was bringing us a sequel, True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop. This time our main character is Verity, who you may remember from the first book even though she had a...