Category: Realistic Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a story deeply steeped in the culture of gaming that was quietly shaping reality from within imaginary spaces, starting in the late eighties and continuing until today. A hot topic these days, but rarely explored in fiction with such thorough tenderness. There’s a certain insanity that accompanies creative passion, and this is the force driving the tempestuous friendship of our two game designer main characters, who can’t live with or without each other. For different players, games are an obsession, a comfort, an artistic experience, a release, or a thin surrogate for a fulfilling reality. Zevin explores all this and more in her brilliant book.



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We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


We Play Ourselves is a wry, spicy critique of the pursuit of artistic fame on two different American coasts. Watching the narrator’s past and present derailing creates a metafictional experience, as we also gain pleasure from knowing the private and public details of her life, all her failures and fantasies, complicit in a facsimile of voyeurism that is just… really, really smart. Darkly funny, but also resonant. Made me want to go to L.A. without a plan.



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In his first novel Someone Should Pay for Your Pain, Franz Nicolay comes at his story with a lyricist’s love of beauty and a seasoned performer’s world-weariness. The resulting tension creates a story with a sticky floor and a hazy smell, where moral ambiguity abounds. You could tell a young, starry-eyed scenester “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be”, or you could just hand them this novel. Both rough-edged-honest and blithely cynical, Someone Should Pay for Your Pain is an ode to all the acts who never made it big, fell in love too hard with the life to let it go, and are scheduled to play a weeknight basement show somewhere in Ohio, wondering what it all means now.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Great Alone is one of those emotionally-driven novels that will have you tearing through it like a VW bus careening over icy roads, hungry to know how everything will turn out for the memorable characters that Hannah weaves into this wilderness tale set in 1970s Alaska. Even though several of the characters edge hard into archetype, she breathes such detail into them that they feel real despite it. (And as we all know, some people really are living breathing archetypes… so hey.) While the book spans a multigenerational struggle against patterns of domestic violence and definitely mediates on the ways the wild works on us as human beings, the true shining gem of the novel is the love story at its core. A great read for those who want an emotionally dramatic story that is both harrowing and satisfying by the end.



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My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My Sister’s Keeper is melodrama done well, with a side of interesting ethical quandaries. The premise itself is the book’s biggest strength–should a young woman who was born for the purpose of being a blood and organ donor to her leukemia-stricken sister be allowed medical emancipation from her parents, even if it’s at the cost of her sister’s life? It’s fascinating and emotionally taxing territory to ponder. This is the chess board upon which Jodi Picoult plays her pieces: characters who have exaggerated, caricature-like personalities but also moving, true inner dialogues that almost make up for it. Some of the plot conveniences are certainly too convenient to be believed, but they create a resulting environment of heightened emotion that sets Picoult up to spike her best moments right into reader’s hearts. While elements of the story itself were overwrought, certain truths about parenthood, sisterhood, and human rights get explored along the way, and make this novel worth the quick read.

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