reviews

A Bitter Conclusion to a Rocky Romance Author: M.C. Beaton Returning to Agatha’s tumultuous life after a short break, I was anxious to see how the long anticipated marriage between our favorite ill-tempered sleuth and her on-again, off-again man would pan out. From the beginning, Agatha’s strength of character and assertiveness have revealed her vulnerability and her emotional neediness. Always the brazen business woman, Agatha is having difficulty not only with her own aging and retirement, but with her lonesome status in the world. Curiously addicted to a bad relationship, Agatha has always been a tween at heart for the [...]

Bird of death... Author:  Max Porter When their wife and mother dies suddenly, the dad and two boys live on.  Forever broken by this unexpected tragedy, the threesome searches for a way to go on living.  While the underlying story couldn’t be simpler, Grief is the Thing with Feathers presents loss and suffering in a uniquely complex and painful way. In his first novel, British writer Max Porter divides the narration between the Dad and the Boys, revealing their different perspectives.  In addition, interspersed between the grievers’ installments, we’re treated to commentary by Crow, their dark and vulgar imaginary friend.  [...]

If you build it... Author:  Janna Levin The usual superlatives fail.  Even extra tremendous superlatives don’t do the topic justice.  Theoretically, gravitational waves are everywhere, generated by actions as simple as the Earth’s revolution around the Sun.  They’re just so vanishingly weak that Einstein – the man who first convinced the world that they exist – thought they would forever be undetectable.  But few things motivate an experimental physicist more than the claim that something is impossible.  What if one searches for the most energetic gravitational events since the big bang?  Could such an event produce enough gravitational radiation that [...]