Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by Mark S, Colorado

If you'd like to be able to easily share your reviews with others, please join BookBrowse.
Order Reviews by:
The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl
by Bart Yates
An Interesting Story (5/15/2024)
I enjoyed this book. It's a relatively easy read, basically broken into several short stories documenting different stages and happenings in the life of Isaac Dahl. Some were more interesting than others; I particularly enjoyed the stories about his childhood in Utah, the dust bowl days in Oklahoma, and his adventures in WWII. I think it's really as much about Isaac's family as it is about Isaac himself, which added much to the depth and breadth of the story.

There was one part of the book that I found implausible. The author claimed that Isaac and his sister had orange juice and crackers for breakfast regularly when they were poor kids in a mining town in Utah in 1928. I don't know where they would have gotten the orange juice but I find it unlikely that they would have access to and/or be able to afford it. There was another spot (page 42?) where a sentence contained a line of gibberish - I suspect a spell-check gone wrong (hopefully not an example of what we have to look forward to with AI). I'm sure the editors will correct that as it goes to print.

I thought the repeated theme of homosexuality was a little much; However, it was done tastefully and was not overdone.

All told I enjoyed the book. It's a light read, something to bring on vacation or to take your mind off the troubles of the day. I'll mention it to some of my friends.
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...
  • Book Jacket: My Friends
    My Friends
    by Hisham Matar
    The title of Hisham Matar's My Friends takes on affectionate but mournful tones as its story unfolds...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.