There are times when you don’t finish a book in time for a book club discussion but you go anyway. I mean, it’s all about the wine and conversation, right?
(Europa Editions)
Bronsky had me on her first page, with the sentence, “I was nearly six, and I knew a thing or two about love.” When Max, who lives with his grandparents in a German home for refugees, sees that his grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor Nina, he and the reader both know that chaos will ensue. Max’s titular grandmother is unforgettable, and not because she’s a sweet old lady. More like a nasty old lady, who hates Jews: “Not because of Jesus of anything. I have genuine, personal reasons.” This, despite gaining refugee status by claiming to be Jewish.
February 5, 2021
Lisa Zeidner
THE WASHINGTON POST – Over the course of three novels, Melanie Finn has taken readers to settings as far-flung as picturesque Swiss towns and rural Tanzania. In her fourth,
The Hare, Finn mostly traps us in an uninsulated, mice-infested cabin in Northern Vermont. This is not a cheery book, but like those Vermont woods in winter, it shimmers with a stark loveliness.
Rosie Monroe, an orphan raised by a cold grandmother, gets a scholarship to study design in New York, and there meets Bennett – seductive, mysterious and 20 years her senior. Bennett sweeps her into his life as the scion of a rich Connecticut family. In the early chapters,