All posts tagged: suburbia

Therese Anne Fowler’s stunning new fiction, A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD, will leave you breathless, questioning everything–it’s a must read.

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By Leslie Lindsay Hugely gripping contemporary novel that examines the American dream through the lens of two families living side-by-side in an idyllic neighborhood, but that summer their lives change irrevocably. ~WeekEND Reading SPOTLIGHT!| ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ Five GIANT stars to A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD by Therese Anne Fowler (St. Martin’s Press, March 10 2020). I cannot say enough about this book. It’s emotional, it’s timely, it’s affecting, it’s thought-provoking, it’s urgent. Read this book, you won’t regret it. Here’s what drew me: Neighbors, neighborhoods, trees, houses, families. Suburbia. But there’s so much more to this story. So much. Don’t take my word for it. Jodi Piccoult says this of A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD: “Therese Anne Fowler has taken the ingredients of racism, justice, and conservative religion and concocted a feast of a read: compelling, heartbreaking, and inevitable. I finished A Good Neighborhood in a single sitting. Yes, it’s that good.” And if that’s not enough, Kirkus gives it a starred review and Library Journal does, too. Many others are calling it ‘speechless,’ and ‘powerful,’ a ‘tour de force.’ …

The street lights have come on, it’s time to go inside…Carrianne Leung on her sublime novel-in-short-stories, plus what happens behind closed doors, suicide, mental illness, more

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By Leslie Lindsay  Brilliant collection of intertwined/interconnected short stories about a suburban subdivision in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award  (Writers’ Union of Canada)  An Amazon Best Book of the Month  (Literature & Fiction) Such a striking and brilliant collection of short stories from Canadian author Carrianne Leung. I absolutely adored THAT TIME I LOVED YOU (Liveright Publishing, February 2019), and felt a bit melancholy when it was over; I wanted to stay with these characters longer.  ~ DECEMBER SHORT STORIES SERIES ~ When I finished this collection, sat the book down, I said, “Five glorious stars,” and I don’t do that often. These stories are about children losing innocence, adults burying their pain. They start off with a ‘rash’ of parent suicides, one right after the other, in this new development, where everything appears ‘perfect.’ The characters are flawed but endearing. Leung’s prose is absolutely glimmering and lucid. I couldn’t get enough. THAT TIME I LOVED YOU is a harrowing and stunning portrait of suburbia in that tender period of adolescence and new promise (the neighborhood is …

Deliciously dark domestic debut from Samantha Downing will have you reading at break-neck speed and looking at your neighbors differently

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By Leslie Lindsay  5 juicy stars to this tautly paced, all-encompassing deliciously dark domestic suspense, MY LOVELY WIFE (Berkley, March 26 2019) will capture and ensnare and have you looking twice at your neighbors.  Truly stunning, jaw-dropping, and so engrossing, you simply cannot look away. That’s what debut author, Samantha Downing, is so skilled at in her debut–this is a debut, people!–and you absolutely have to read it. Here’s the thing: it’s dark. It’s twisted, but on the surface, it’s oh-so-saccharine. Married for 15 years, Millicent and her unnamed husband, the protagonist/narrator have found themselves in a slightly boring marriage. They have two kids, a boy and a girl who are on the cusp of adolescence. It’s a nice life in a nice suburban area of Florida where everyone goes to work and then home for a pre-planned dinner. There’s soccer and tennis lessons and Millicent sells real estate. But MY LOVELY WIFE (Berkley, March 26) is a powerhouse of a novel. It’s about drama, a marriage, kids out of control, and the news media; it’s also about the folks next door, …

Wednesdays with Writers: She’s back with a darker and more mysterious tale of families and motherhood with THE FAMILY NEXT DOOR. Join me and Sally Hepworth as we chat about the ‘magical power of hair,’ working from the library, the serious side of mothering in the form postpartum mood disorders, and the predictability of the suburbs

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By Leslie Lindsay Searing secrets…riveting revelations, Sally Hepworth’s fourth book of domestic fiction, THE FAMILY NEXT DOOR (March 6 2018, St. Martin’s Press), is a jaw-dropping gut-punch.  This suburban-set story centers on the folks of Pleasant Court, where everything is picture-perfect, at least from the outside. We start the story with Essie, three years ago, when she did a horrible thing just following the birth of her first baby. She’s gotten help and has pretty much put that incident behind her. But over on Pleasant Court, where Essie moves with her preschool daughter and hottie hubby, and new baby, she can’t help but feel a bit untethered. Her mother, Barbara, the quintessential grandmother moves in just doors away and helps with the little girls. We meet Ange and her boys, her suspicion that the photography client is perhaps a little ‘more’ to her husband than ‘just a client;’ and Fran…her obsessive running. Just what is she running from? And then we meet Isabelle, childless and single and new to the neighborhood. Who is she and why is she there?  Questions and …

WeekEND Reading: How quickly life can spin out of control…Jennifer Kitses talks about this, how she is constantly buying books, her literary inspirations, time loops, and more in this stunning look at 24-hours in a suburban marriage SMALL HOURS

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By Leslie Lindsay A tipping point of a novel with tense domestic vignettes leading each character deeper and deeper into destructive behavior.  SMALL HOURS is a slow-burn, ‘tinderbox’ of a debut novel (Matthew Thomas, WE ARE NOT OURSELVES) in which we are just waiting for the inevitable to explode. We follow the lives of a married couple, Tom and Helen for 24-hours. Told in alternating POVs (Helen and Tom), we dive into a myriad of secrets, promises, deadlines, children, neighbors, etc. It’s one small step into the danger zone with each paragraph read, with each flip of the page, each turn of the hour. I kind of wanted to shake these people. Perhaps that is what makes Jennifer Kitses’s debut so palpable. We can *feel* the tensions arising, see the outcome before her characters and we just want to thrust an arm out and say, ‘Stop!’ But the reading is propulsive; I wanted to keep reading. It was like a bad accident on the side of the road: you don’t want to look, but you do. Tom …

Write On, Wednesday: Meet Lauren Acampora, author of THE WONDER GARDEN

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By Leslie Lindsay Oh. My. Gosh. I can’t stop thinking about Lauren Acampora’s debut. It’s dark, it’s brilliant. It’s utterly amazing. I wanted to finish reading because I loved the stories, the words, the depth and perception. Still, I wallowed in book limbo when I closed the cover for the final time; nothing compared to the carefully cultivated words that is THE WONDER GARDEN. Today, I am thrilled and honored to have Lauren on our blog couch. L.L.: Lauren, thank you so much for popping by. I knew I was going to fall into the tangles of your prose after reading the first line. And then when the second line had something to do with a house, well, I was all over it. Can you tell us how the stories in THE WONDER GARDEN came to be? What was your inspiration? Lauren Acampora: Hi Leslie, thanks for having me. I’m so glad you loved the book—and that you share my infatuation with houses! The stories in THE WONDER GARDEN sprang very much from looking at, …