Book Reviews

Nel Rand’s debut novel is a picaresque tale that takes the reader down the Mississippi River and through the haunted past of its main character, Ellie. Ellie is recovering from divorce when her estranged father, Tiny Moon, a 300-pound gambler and eating contest champion, re-enters her life. Despite her efforts to remember her deep-seated anger for Tiny, Ellie finds herself drinking wine with him and relaxing for the first time in months. When he asks her to join him on a trip down the Mississippi River, she readily accepts.

But she soon discovers that this is no vacation: Tiny is […]

Powered by an intriguingly complex antihero, richly described realm-building, relentless pacing, and a darkly lyrical and deeply philosophical narrative, the first installment of J.R. Bailey’s fantasy series is gloriously comparable to classic adventure fantasy sagas like Moorcock’s History of the Runestaff, Howard’s Conan, and Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

After almost being turned into a vampire, young necromancer Koristad Altessor was chained and imprisoned in a coffin for 16 long years. Now freed and working as a proxy lightwielder – a warrior dedicated to keeping the peace and upholding the laws of the empire – Koristad sets out to […]

Barnato’s adventure tale, which travels between Scotland and South Africa, begins dramatically in 1999 when Johannes, a young South African, sets fire to his neighbor’s house after catching him having sex with his wife. The next chapter rapidly shifts to a Scottish castle and is written through the eyes of Boysie, the new resident Jack Russell terrier, who gives an amusing account of the entertaining life of his masters Rupert and Dianna. The morning after one wild party, Boysie and the other dogs take advantage of the place: “By seven, the castle was as silent as if the occupants had […]

When retired Hollywood scriptwriter Glenn P. Wolfe succumbed to lung cancer in 2007, at age 81, he left unfinished this wildly inventive story about the tricks of memory and the emotional tug of baseball; about comic folly in a disorderly family, the neuroses of showbiz folk, and the glories of language itself. There’s so much energy and wit in “Book One” of Wolfe’s incomplete magnum opus that even its intermittent shortcomings—repetition and verbal excess—feel like blessings. Absent an ending, the tale still satisfies.

The title derives from the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, who is also the mother of the […]