White glove wars

I picked up Katie Crouch’s YA novel The Magnolia League thinking it sounded something like last year’s Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. Forget that. Despite a similarity in plot — motherless girls whisked away to genteel Savannah — Hoffman’s coming-of-age tale is sweetly conventional. Not so with Crouch’s spicy story, in which 16-year-old [...]

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Cast a spell on me

The new normal is the paranormal in much of today’s fiction, both literary and commercial. Here a ghost, there a zombie, everywhere a vampire or a werewolf. But several recent novels enchant with the magic of storytelling even as they trip the light fantastic. Alice Hoffman, of course, is one of the leading practitioners of American magical [...]

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When food has feelings

I spent a couple hours yesterday trying to find a Steven Millhauser short story I read years ago. Of course, I couldn’t remember the name of it, although I was pretty sure I had the anthology where I first read it. Something about libraries. But what was the name? Many internet searches later, I had the [...]

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Flying High in Florida

Oohhh… Forgive me. I’m feeling giddy, word-drunk, high on the sights and sounds and smells of Connie May Fowler’s intoxicating new novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly. Thickets of roses. Heat-blanched sky.  A marble tumbling on a heart pine floor.  Faint fiddle music. Ghosts and graveyard dirt.  A woman standing on the worn planks [...]

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Something magic

A modern-day Medusa with anger-control issues. A snarky vampire worried about his 800-year-old looks. Blades of grass growing like sharp knives in a suburban backyard. These were just three of the fantastic images generated by participants in a recent writing workshop on magical realism sponsored by MAD About Words and moderated by current Kerouac House [...]

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