Read Her Like an Open Book

Whistler –Ann Patchett (Harper: June 2) Fifty-three-year-old Daphne, an English teacher at a private school, and her husband Jonathan are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they encounter the man who was her stepfather for two years when she was a child. Circumstances led Eddie Triplett to leave the family abruptly when Daphne was 9, something Daphne and her younger sister Leda didn’t understand at the time and had mostly forgotten about as her mother remarried and the years passed.

I was planning to post a longer piece with three more reviews today, but several things conspired to interfere with that plan. So I thought I’d share these two reviews now and post the others later this week. Tata — Valerie Perrin (Europa Editions: June 23) I loved Valerie Perrin’s first book translated into English, Fresh Water for Flowers (2020), and enjoyed the follow-up, Three (2022), and her first book, Forgotten on Sunday, when it was made available in English IN 2024.

So you want to be a writer. So you want to tug a reader close enough to feel your breath. You want to write something that really means something, and you want someone to need it. But agents, you say. But publishing. And your heart darkens like the softest spot on an overripe fruit, rotten from waiting. Yes, I want to console you with knowing. Agents. Publishers. Because I know what it means to want so much from words, to want them to take a shape you can hold in your hands.

My July 2 post about distinctly American books that make for suitable reading during the USA’s 250th birthday received such a positive response that I decided to share eight more books that either didn’t get enough attention when they were published or have faded from readers’ awareness. I hope you discover (or rediscover) some books that provide you with a satisfying reading experience.

Americans are living in unprecedented times. And while most of us are protesting and resisting in whatever ways make sense for us, we’re also going on with our lives. It’s the kind of surreal situation I’d previously only read about. In the last year and a half so much has changed so dramatically. I still believe passionately in the America that strives to be good, the America in which the Constitution is our scripture, and the America that celebrates democracy and pluralism.

This week’s guest author post gives readers an up-close look at how one author revises her work-in-progress. I’ve always enjoyed learning about the elements of the creative process at this kind of granular level. If you haven’t read the work of Alice Elliott Dark, start with her most recent novel, Fellowship Point (2022). In the middle of January, I began to revise a novel.

Recently, my dear friend Susan Coll asked me to speak to her novel-writing class about creating and developing characters, one of my very favorite topics. I was excited about the visit, but it occurred to me that Susan’s students had likely already heard much of what I had to say about the topic from her or elsewhere. I considered dusting off the character questionnaire I’d created for my undergraduate fiction writing students, but it seemed a little dry.

May was a good reading month. I read several well-crafted and satisfying books, three of which I review here. Another, Tata by Valerie Perrin, is coming out in late June, so I’m saving the review for later this month. And a couple were backlist books that I’ll probably post along with my review of Tata.

By Shannon Bowring I often joke that the Dalton Novels trilogy took either three years or thirty years to write, depending on how you look at it. Though the books were published in quick succession between 2023 and 2025, the process behind writing them took nearly my entire lifetime. The fictional town of Dalton, Maine is inspired by the town where I was born and raised in Aroostook County, the isolated, sweeping swath of land that forms the crown of the state.

Short stories don’t receive the attentionthey deserve. Some readers dislike having to get oriented to characters, settings, and conflicts every 15 or 20 pages. And some find the tight focus and often unsettled conclusions dissatisfying. I found that the more stories I read, the better I became at appreciating the craft involved in writing short fiction and understanding writers’ tendency to not beat readers over the head to make their point.