September 2, 2008 – 1:01 pm
~ buy this book ~
I first read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in college. Years later, what’s stayed with me is a fascination with magical realism and one story about Márquez. When he finished One Hundred Years, his wife Mercedes pawned her hair dryer and the electric heater in order to pay for postage to mail it to a publisher. Even then, they had to mail it in two parts because they didn’t have enough postage!
So what is “magical realism”? A story with fantastic elements – told as if those elements were absolutely normal. (I should put […]
Women’s fiction is such an interesting category. I know we’ve discussed it on the Bulletin Board quite a bit, are its parameters defined by the ending (not necessarily happy), or by the age of the main character (not twenty and nubile), by the range of characters (lots), by generations (often three), by?.
Here’s my definition: I think women’s fiction roughly defines itself from romance in one simple way: flawed heroines. As a practitioner of romance, and one who loves it dearly, I read very few romances in which the heroine is truly flawed. Yes, there are some who are tstl (too […]
November 1, 2006 – 11:58 am
There are two things about this book that I found immediately noteworthy. The first was that I’m thanked in the acknowledgments. (See? I’m disclosing that right up front, just the way the NPR guys do.) So, kisses going right back at you, Connie!
And the second point is that this is Connie’s first contemporary novel. She’s always written historicals before - set in the misty, romantic past, just like mine. Every once in a while, I imagine actually finding myself in a ballroom in Regency England. As long as I was drop-dead gorgeous, seventeen-years-old, and very thin, I’m sure I’d fit […]
I know I’m late on the bandwagon on this one, since Angry Housewives was published in 2003 (and, if you ask me, probably had something to do with inspiring Desperate Housewives). I had Angry Housewives sitting around the house for at least a year until I finally pulled it from the to-be-read pile. And then found myself reading half the night as my husband peacefully slept along beside me. This is a book that reminded me a lot of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. The author sets up a group of female friends (here, a book club), and then watches them […]
First the romance:
The Color of Light
by Karen White I read one of Karen’s earlier books, and I still remember reading faster and faster, until finally I was speeding like a bullet train that had sprung the track. I cried and cried, reading that book. The good news is that there’s no reason to cry in this one. The bad news is that I found myself reading in the still of the night. I couldn’t hear a word from the children’s bedrooms; our fat Chihuahua, Milo, was sleeping on his back and my husband was sprawled on his stomach. There […]
