March by Geraldine Brooks My rating: 4 of 5 stars In the classic, LITTLE WOMEN, we, as readers, become intimately acquainted the four “little women,” and their mother, Mrs. March. However, we know little about their father who is away from home, serving the Union army as a chaplain during the Civil War. In her [...]

Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Even as one who has spent considerable time in Africa, “in the trenches,” so to speak, one who has many African friends, I cannot say that I truly understand Africans. Their different ways of thinking, their cultures, their perceptions, often leave [...]

The Hour I First Believed: A Novel by Wally Lamb My rating: 4 of 5 stars At first I wasn’t so sure about this book . . . Eighty-odd pages into it, the protagonist/1st-person-narrator, Caelum Quirk, was a real jerk — one of those kind of people whom I avoid in real life. But the [...]

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire My review rating: 3 of 5 starsThere was much in Gregory Maguire’s novel, WICKED, that tickled my fancy. Elphaba, the main character more commonly known as “The Wicked Witch of the West” in the Wizard of Oz, sheds her uni-dimensional [...]