Heller McAlpin

A Family's Secrets And Sorrows Surface In 'Heatwave'

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:03:00 +0000

British writer Maggie O'Farrell, born in Northern Ireland, is less well-known in the U.S. than she should be. Her mesmerizing, tautly plotted novels often revolve around long-standing, ugly family secrets and feature nonconformist women who rebel against their strict Irish Catholic upbringing. Her most recent books, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) and The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), offer the sort of spellbinding reads that can make you miss your flight announcement.

I nearly missed my subway stop while immersed in Instructions for a Heatwave.

Food For Thought In Shriver's 'Big Brother'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Lionel Shriver tackles a whopper of an issue in her new novel, Big Brother: obesity and the emotional connection between weight, consumption, guilt and control. She comes at this huge subject through a sister torn between saving her morbidly obese older brother, who has "buried himself in himself," and an unsympathetic, belligerently fit husband — a situation that raises questions about divided loyalties and whether blood is thicker than water.

Farm Team Saga 'Class A' Hits It Out Of The Park

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Is there room for another book about America's favorite pastime? Lucas Mann's Class A earns a position in a lineup that already includes Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural, The Boys of Summer, Moneyball and The Art of Fielding because, remarkably, it offers a fresh, unexpected angle on this well-trodden game.

Chances are you'll be hearing lots of cheers proclaiming Mann's genre-bending book a Grand slam!

A 'Bargain Basement Molly Bloom' Looks Back On Eight Decades

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Back in the early 1950s, as a lonely, pregnant young wife already ruing her rash elopement, Edna O'Brien sobbed through the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and wondered, "Why could life not be lived at that same pitch?

Owls, Yes, But Also Kookaburras And Dentists In Sedaris' Latest

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:09:00 +0000
Plenty of personal essayists, including really good ones like Nora Ephron, Anna Quindlen and E.B. White, burn out or switch to fiction after a few books. Even Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French writer often acknowledged as the father of the genre that combines intelligent reflection with anecdotes and autobiography, produced only one volume — albeit a massive one.

Minks, Perfume And Beastly Beauty In 'Shocked'

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Beauty can be a beast. That's one message from Shocked, Patricia Volk's smart, fascinating book about her complex relationship with her beautiful, elegantly attired, hypercritical mother.
Volk's delightful first memoir, Stuffed, which focused on her eccentric family of New York restaurateurs, was published just a year after the death, in 2000, of her 80-year-old father, Cecil Sussman Volk, longtime proprietor of Morgen's West Restaurant but also a sculptor, inventor and motorcycle enthusiast.

Learning 'Life' Lessons With McCorkle's Seniors

Heller McAlpin — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000
Amid a literary landscape increasingly rife with metafictional and postmodern high jinks, Jill McCorkle's sixth novel, Life After Life, is as resolutely down to earth and unpretentious as the hot-dog franchise owned by one of her characters. For her first novel in 17 years, McCorkle has dared to write a heartwarmer that takes place largely in a retirement home and stresses the importance of good old-fashioned kindness.
(Oddly, McCorkle and Kate Atkinson both have novels called Life After Life coming out this spring, which is bound to cause some confusion.

Can This Hypercomplex 'Leopard' Change Its Spots?

Heller McAlpin — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000
What's a reader to believe, especially when confronted with an unreliable narrator? Which of the many versions spun by the self-confessed liar and aspiring writer in Kristopher Jansma's far-flung, deliberately far-fetched, hyper-inventive first novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, should we buy?

A New Focus On An Old Image In 'Mary Coin'

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:03:00 +0000
Do you remember those school assignments where you were asked to make up a story based on a picture? With Mary Coin, Marisa Silver looks long and hard at an image that has been seared into our nation's consciousness — Dorothea Lange's iconic Depression-era photograph "Migrant Mother" — and compassionately imagines the lives behind it. The result is a fresh angle on the Great Depression and a lesson in learning how to really look and see.
Silver anchors her novel with research into Lange and her migrant subject, Florence Owens Thompson.

Secrets, Lies And The Allure Of The Illicit

Heller McAlpin — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000
By the time Wendy Plump learned from a friend that her husband had a longtime mistress and an 8-month-old son living just a mile away, their union was already pockmarked with the scars of adultery — both his and hers. She divulges all this and more in Vow, her at times jaw-droppingly frank but ultimately instructive post-mortem on their 18-year marriage.
You may well wonder why someone would go public with such intimate, painful details of her personal life.