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Reviews by Mark O. (Wenatchee, WA)

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The Map of True Places
The Map of True Places
by Brunonia Barry
the moving stars ground us (4/17/2010)
If “The Map of True Places” were slid into a book MRI (bMRI), we would likely see faint yellow patches in the plot and idea regions but the character region would be lit bright red. Barry found the sweet spot for her characters, neither vessels for carrying a plot nor too …more
The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
by Gina Ochsner
Surviving with grace (12/30/2009)
Like the labels on wine bottles, this book has flavors of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate with a hint of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. The setting is a Russia so squalid that people are almost feral. …more
The Book of God and Physics
The Book of God and Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery
by Enrique Joven
The past can be present tense (6/30/2009)
This is a historical novel, not in the usual sense of time travel to the past, but rather the solving of a puzzle using clues from history. Like all good literary puzzles, the intellectual tour is at least half the fun; we learn lots about the history of astronomy and visit …more
An Edible History of Humanity
An Edible History of Humanity
by Tom Standage
Food and the Turning Points of History (3/24/2009)
Standage writes on “… the intersections between food history and world history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done most to shape the modern world, and how?” So, this book is coarse-grain history, telling us about the sprouting of civilizations from the …more
Can't Remember What I Forgot
Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research
by Sue Halpern
In search of lost memory (6/3/2008)
From middle age on, the term “senior moment” carries the hope that a forgotten name is just the slow slide into mild fuzziness and not the first sign of Alzheimer ’s disease. Sue Halpern’s book “Can’t Remember What I Forgot: the Good News from the Front Lines of Memory …more
Red Rover
Red Rover
by Deirdre McNamer
Coming-of-(old)-age in Montana (10/5/2007)
Novels set in familiar places are often a disappointment. We expect the places and institutions and people to be accurate, even though we know that the author has a license to write fiction. So I came to this novel - Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer - anchored in the Sweet …more
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  • Book Jacket
    Real Americans
    by Rachel Khong
    From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.
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  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

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