Hands of my Father by Myron Uhlberg

Hands of My Father is the sweet remembrance of the author’s childhood, growing up with two deaf parents asa hearing child who had to serve as an interpreter in a world that was not too kind to any kind of disability and certainly not to deafness. Even his parents’ families treated them with surprising callousness: [...]

Bed and Breakfast by Lois Battle

The owner of the Bed & Breakfast of the story is the mother of three grown daughters who gathers all three for what she hopes to be a peaceful, perhaps joyful Christmas celebration. Alas, all three daughters misbehave in predictable and unpredictable patterns and the hoped-for celebration is a disaster, but over the [...]

The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi

The Wish Maker tells the story of three generations of a Pakistani family, culminating in the grandson going off to Harvard (like the narrator) and focusing on his mother and his mother’s much younger female cousin on the background of Pakistan’s complicated politics of the 1990s. This could be a triumph, like A Golden Age, [...]

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

I wish Joyce Carol Oates would choose happier topics for her books (here and here). I love her writing but why are all the books so very dark? Little Bird of Heavenis the story of a girl whose father is suspected of murdering his mistress, a crime he did not commit, but the town’s suspicion [...]

Onitsha by Jean-Marie Le Clezio

Onitsha is the story of a boy raised by his mother in France and Italy who travels to Nigeria with his mother to finally meet his English father, who works as a bureaucrat for a British company but longs to study the historical migration from Egypt to Nigeria. The first third of the book describes [...]

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

That Old Cape Magic is a messily-written story of a couple, two weddings, and three deaths (but no funerals, only botched ash-dispersing exercises for two of them), and the long quest for the hero, the husband, to get out from the very long shadow of his unhappy (separately and together) parents. Unlike the last book [...]

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman

If I were smart I would stop reading books that feature demons and fairies, but I persevered despite the clear warning on the very first page. OF the three Story Sisters, one is disturbed following a childhood molestation incident her parents know nothing about and the other two suffer her increasing troubles mostly by covering [...]

My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates

My Sister, My Love tells the story of a little girl who is mysteriously murdered in the house of her wealthy parents. And she’s a budding ice skater, always clad in exaggerated girlish outfits complete with makeup and “done” hair, which made me very suspicious that I was entering a tabloid world, which it’s a [...]

Doghead by Morten Ramsland

Doghead is the story of a Norwegian-Danish boy with a wacky family that includes an alcoholic father, a grandfather with an uncertain past, and several young men who took to the seas since they definitely did not fit in. Children are brought up in decidedly hands-off, sometimes cruel ways but manage to find their ways [...]

Closing Time by Joe Queenan

Closing Time is a memoir that reads like a novel of a tough childhood, growing up with an alcoholic father who beat his children (often and hard), who could not hold on to a job, and who made a number of questionable decisions, some told hilariously like the time he decided to “drive” his delivery [...]