Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.
Think about using it yourselves!
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At Last: A Novel by Marisa Silver
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Set in midcentury America, At Last explores a rich family saga centered on two fierce and competitive matriarchs whose intertwined lives reflect the complexities of family, tradition, and personal ambition.
Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning, and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter.
At Last paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them. Both intimate and expansive, and capturing the complexities of ambition and love with humor and insight, At Last is a testament to what happens when an unintended, even unwanted relationship turns out to be a central one that defines a life.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I was in the mood for a family saga, but this one wasn't the one I was looking for. Helene and Evelyn were spoiled selfish brats; Ruth got one good thing, birthing Francie, and one dropped thread that annoyed me (what the hell ever happened to those bloody letters?!); and Francie did less for me than her invisible father did.
Maybe I'm grouchy because I was really hot for some family drama and got lots of unkind, whiny selfishness instead.
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $14.99 for an ebook. Read a sample before committing.
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The Sun Dog: A Novel of Native America (The Native American Saga #3) by Robert Downes
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: A tale of sorcery, witchcraft, and romance set in the heart of Native America—where myth and truth collide, and the line between savior and monster begins to blur.
When a Seneca Iroquois town on Lake Ontario is beset by an evil spirit, its female chieftain, Walking Turtle, calls upon seven shamans and seven warriors from neighboring tribes to free her people from the demon. Meanwhile, in an isolated village to the north, a young woman named Found by the River is accused of witchcraft. She and her protector, Willow, face certain death unless they can escape their tormentors.
Into this scenario comes Sun Dog, a charismatic magician leading a band of refugees fleeing the collapse of their civilization 800 miles to the south. Sun Dog and his people are survivors of mighty Coosa, a realm destroyed by the army of Spanish conquistador, Hernán de Soto. Sun Dog vows to rid the Senecas of their demon, while wrestling with a sinister force of his own. He alone can decide the fate of those condemned as witches.
Brimming with unforgettable characters and grounded in history, The Sun Dog is the follow-up to The Wolf and The Willow, reintroducing Willow and Wolf in an ongoing saga set in Native America during the tumultuous “Lost Century” of the 1500s. The Sun Dog is the final installment of the Native American Saga.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I was so confused during this read. It's apparently pretty enmeshed in the events of earlier books that reading it first was not at all a happy experience...in no way is this the book's fault.
The story and the prose were agreeable, interesting, and if I'd been fully in the picture I expect I'd've been warbling my fool lungs out to go get one.
Blank Slate Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $20.95 for a paperback. Start with #1, Windigo Moon: A Novel of Native America, if you want to read it.
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Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal by Gary S. Cross
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The history of leisure time, from the earliest societies to the work-from-home era
Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes?
Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Gary S. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma.
Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theaters and organized sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: The subtitle needed to add: "...in the US" to be representative of the contents. It's interesting, trenchant, a bit tendentious; not unusually so in any of those cases. It's explicitly acknowledged in the up front text; it needs to be more forcefully stated still.
Strongly recommended to the Robert Reich and Thomas Piketty crowd, urged on the Thom Hartmann readers too.
NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $25.00 for an ebook.
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Set for Life: A Novel by Andrew Ewell
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: A wryly funny and moving novel that captures the complexities of marriage, art, friendship, and the fictions we create in order to become the people we wish to be.
A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs.
But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it.
A brilliant case of art imitating life, Andrew Ewell’s gem of a debut is a hilarious and poignant tour de force that asks who owns whose story, skewers the fictions created from our lives and others’, and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “publish or perish.”
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Competently executed riposte to a very nasty break-up between the author and his ex, writer Hannah Pittard. I was mildly amused, chuckled a time or two, received the w-i-n-k and nudge from him as he detailed how absurd break-up spats are; nothing new, in short.
It's fine, but not my favorite read of 2024.
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $13.99 for an ebook. Read a sample first.
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Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Bad Foundations is a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.
Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay. At his other job, as a father, he has to learn how to bond with his teenage daughter, but that's hard to do when covered in spider webs.
High on legal weed and searching for answers to life's mysteries, Cook works alongside similar colorful characters trying to make money and save for the future. That is until a bad sales month spirals out into a quantum stay at a surreal Ohio hotel.
New friendships are made, old curses are dealt with, and the local police force is put to the test. Told in a stylized working-class voice, Brian Allen Carr is a true raconteur of the American Midwest.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Double entendres and in-jokes for the literarily informed; not much of a plot to keep you reading, though. It's a book I browsed through for a couple years but never lost interest enough to Pearl-Rule it forever.
I don't know if y'all're gonna resonate to the odd combo of working-class setting and slightly recherché philosophical and literary-theory concepts.
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)requests and requires delivery of $17.95 for a paperback.
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.
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The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse (85%) by Ed Simon
Rating: 1.5* of five
The Publisher Says: No Western religious concept has been as socially, culturally, economically, and politically significant as that of the apocalypse. Neither heaven and hell, nor sin and salvation, nor even God and the devil have merited the attention of billions of people in the manner that belief in the end of the world has. Apocalyptic thinking is riven by a fruitful--and at times dangerous--binary between the hopes for a coming millennium when all shall be perfected or of a fiery deluge when the earth shall be destroyed.
The Dove and the Dragon is the first comprehensive history of Western apocalypticism. Ed Simon introduces a new system for classifying movements concerned with the end of history, between hopeful, millennial "doves" and violent, apocalyptic "dragons." This framing connects a seemingly disparate phenomenon, from medieval millennialism (sic) to modern Marxism, Reformation apocalypticism to contemporary techno-utopianism. Expected groups are considered, but unexpected phenomena are interpreted through the lens of apocalypticism as well to argue that those that have often been classified as "secular" still take part in this ancient theological category.
This new way of interpreting history gives sense to the full scope of apocalypticism as a series of movements and as a genre, including not just religion and theology, but politics, philosophy, and pop culture as well. The Dove and the Dragon promises to be the standard introduction for years to come.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Per the publisher, "Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and a staff writer for LitHub, as well as the editor of Belt Magazine." Mistaking the date relationship between the Plague of Justinian (540s) and the Black Death (1340s)...cited as "a century" instead of "eight centuries"...which should not happen even as a draft typo. Multiple infelicities occurred in the realms of definitions, f/ex: when writing a book about apocalypses it's wise to state your definition early, buttress it with cited external sources, and stick to it; never happened that I noticed, we went from millenarian (the "ism" intended above, where I wrote "sic") ideas to technological ones (all cited, but to what purpose if even I can find introduced errors?). And this is a magazine editor writing a book for a religious publisher.
I read the whole book because I was so deeply stunned this made it out of the editing process in this condition. He says of the book, "If a reading of this book demonstrates anything, it’s that that every century has a contingent of people, both smaller and larger depending on circumstance, who are convinced that they’re living in the last days." I am now.
Fortress Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $39.00. They do not deserve it.
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