Margarets summer isn't what she expected. There was a death of a family member that was really close to her and that was her sister. Her parents give up on raising the kids after her sisters death. When she needs help no one is there for her she lives a hard life. She tried to recover from all th...
Probably most of us have read “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank in our teen years. All of my children also read it in their 7th grade Calvert curriculum some 10-20 years ago. I saw the high school play while a teen (at Central Christian, Julia!) and my children’s home school academy also ...
I liked this book and the Albanian main character who is trying to figure out American life. Lula is the live-in caretaker for a high school student, a precarious job for her, since everyone she meets assumes that she is sleeping with his father, the man she calls Mister Stanley. The book descr...
"... there is, in the ocean of generations, an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is born, all daughters of the same salt wave..."Can't say I'll be reading a long list of Balzac titles in my near-future. There is a longstanding tradition of the French bedroom farce out there, and while ...
A Changed Man begins with an ex-white supremacist walking into a human rights organization’s office to offer his services: he wants to “help guys like me from becoming guys like me.” The subject matter allows Prose to flex her satire muscles, which by this point are quite developed. In this case,...
Overflowing in both talent and self-regard, Caravaggio (1571-1610) remains an enigma. He left behind no diaries or letters to convey his thoughts. Instead, contemporaries chose to chronicle his quarrels, profligate drinking and gambling, violent altercations and hurried escapes from vengeful fact...
A conflict of cultures is the backdrop for this early Francine Prose novel. Simone decides to flee Haiti (it's the very unsettled early 1990s). Her lover has cheated; there's no reason to stay, every reason to flee to the U.S. So she finds a way.Simone finds her way to Hudson's Landing, New York,...
What better start to a story than, Joseph Santangelo, the butcher, wins his bride, Catherine Falconetti, in a pinochle game with her father and brother. During a heat wave, Joseph bets a walk into the meat freezer and Lino bets his daughter's hand. A bet is bet in the close knit Italian neighbo...
“Blue Angel,” written by Francine Prose (who has the greatest name for a novelist ever), emits the beautiful, multi-colored flames as a large structure falls to ash. It is worth a look, or a read, despite its failure. One, the book is filled with cardboard characters. The supporting characters, i...
A really smart, satisfying read. Both of the stories deal with Americans abroad in Europe for reasons of cultural tourism. Both protagonists grapple with darkness and severity, they see whorehouses, catacombs, animal slaughter, the gas chamber of a concentration camp...I'm not sure if there's a c...
Prose has assembled here a collection of her stories which dissect at seemingly functional lives, for what an outsider would take as such. In the tradition of Cheever, she allows us to see into the nagging conscious of a character to see what is probably true of all our lives, nothing is certain,...
This unusual novel follows Vera, a single mother living in New York City and working at a tabloid called This Week. Vera writes stories about outlandish creatures, weird occurrences and the unbelievable. She makes all the stories up. Her brain is constantly thinking up lurid headlines for everyth...