-Claire Cook
"Fresh, fun, and charmingly quirky."
Reading when you’re a kid is the best, because everything is fascinating and new, and your heart is still fresh and unsullied by the wear and tear of commuting and filling out tax returns and waiting in line for coffee two hours each morning. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the days when the whole world felt magic, […]
Several summers ago, I rented a cabin in the Catskills for a weekend. It was perched on a hill in middle of nowhere—the nearest grocery store was 15 miles away and staffed by very suspicious locals—and decorated in high rustic style, with musty wool blankets and lamps made out of antlers. Best of all, it had a record […]
The Rosie Project and its sequel, The Rosie Effect, both by Graeme Simsion, leave readers wanting more. More theories from protaganist Don, a sharply intelligent, deeply socially awkward geneticist who’s too logical for his own good. More charming bickering between him and Rosie, the woman who falls in love with him despite herself. More feminist musings. And way more of the special sauce […]
Romances sometimes get a bad rap for being too formulaic and predictable. Just the other day at a dinner party, someone asked me what type of books I liked to read. Despite knowing there was nothing wrong with my choice in reading material, I hung my head in shame and mumbled out “romance” with my […]
When we previously considered the role of narrative voice in fiction, we left out one of the biggies—one in which, if you think about it, there is technically no narrator at all. The epistolary novel, traditionally made up of collections of letters or diary entires, pieces together a narrative through disparate documents, finding a story […]