The "Good Book"This is my first Joyce Maynard book. I'm not eager to pick up another Maynard book nor am I unforgiving enough to think that all her books have been written along the same vein. It is more the case that this was an exhausting read that necessitates recovery time. The reader is ass...
I loved this book!! Such a unique way of telling a story. The book is fiction but is based largely on the Pamela Smart case of the early 90's; it also rings familiar with numerous other real-life cases that have gotten national media attention throughout recent years, way after the book was wri...
I should have gone right to bed when I got home, but I didn’t. I didn’t even go straight home, to tell the truth. On the road between the Havillands’ house and my apartment was a liquor store. I must have passed the place a thousand times and barely noticed it. But this time, I pulled in. I bough...
For all the wrong reasons, I loved politics and plunged into the campaign fight. Shivering in the October winds, outside a supermarket (“Hello, would you like some LBJ matches?”), Youth for Johnson tried hard to believe in the man with the ten-gallon hat. We were eager for a hero (we’d lost ours ...
She’s naked. Tomorrow, she thinks, a man will see my body. She is happy with the way she looks. There’s nothing she would change. Jill sits in the third row at the Merrimack Cinema, watching Lady and the Tramp. It was the only movie her mother could find that didn’t have any sex. “We’d be footloo...
I said I’d come to return a book I’d borrowed—not My Secret Garden; I wasn’t about to admit to having taken that one. This was the autobiography of a former Olympic ski racer who’d become a quadriplegic after an accident. Some weeks earlier, on my way to my sweeping job at the police precinct, Je...
JERVIS LEFT, I went back to the kitchen. I had only been gone from the room four minutes, maybe, but even though it was my house, where I’d lived four years almost, and we’d just met Frank yesterday, I had the feeling, coming back in the room, that I was breaking something up. Like a time I walke...
Then around the time she turned sixty, my father began to observe curious changes in her behavior. Always an early riser, who had gotten up at sunrise to fix coffee for my father and see him off to the barn, she began staying in bed until nine or ten, sometimes sleeping, sometimes just lying ther...
I wonder what kind of a dad he’ll be.” There was a lot of laughter then as we imagined scenes: Willy playing baseball with his children—bonking them on the head with the bat, the way he hits Charlie now when the two of them play wiffle ball. Willy—the same size he is now, but sporting a moustache...