Saturday, August 23, 2008

2008 books 125 and 126

Hey, I'm totally stranded in Charlotte right now, thanks to Tropical Storm Fay, so I might as well blog the two books I've read this weekend.

Jincy Willett's The Writing Class
I love this trend of more literary mysteries--here, a has-been novelist is teaching a writing class and one student is terrorizing the others anonymously and to an increasingly creepy extent. Willett is a funny writer and this book has some great moments. A.

Linn Ullmann's A Blessed Child
Random House sent me an advance copy of this (they think it will be a hit with book groups, and I can see why), and it seemed interesting enough to make it onto my book pile, and generally did not disappoint. Basically, it's about three half-sisters who decide to visit their elderly father at his home on an island, as they flash back to their childhood summers and the one summer where things went awry. Here's the NY Times review--I hadn't realized that Ullman was Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman's daughter, but that does mean there's some added interest in this tale of the relationship between fathers and daughters. B+.

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