Novels

Amanda by H S Cross

I’m just guessing, but I contend that at least half of all works of fiction conform to the Shakespearean premise that the course of true love never did run smooth. The impediments to true love are what keep us watching or reading for at least the duration of a play or a novel. If the obstacles are overcome, then we have a comedy of some sort. If not, well we have Romeo and Juliet. So sad. These hindrances often involve an irrational parent, restrictive social norms, big divides of age, background, race, or class, or collective madness as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How much fun or angst we encounter depends on the inventiveness of the author. In this novel, Amanda, also called Marion, helps the author out by creating her own complications to a beautiful love.

In Amanda, a novel set in post-World War I England, a…

September 17, a novel by Amanda West Lewis

This book is based on fact. On September 17, 1940, a ship called the City of Benares, carrying among its passengers 90 children went down en route from England to Canada. Only 13 children survived this tragic attack by the Germans. We see this gripping and meticulously researched account through the eyes of three of these children. Like most of the youngsters aboard, Ken and Bess have already undergone the ordeal of separation from their families. The third child, Sonia, is traveling first class with her mother and brother. The great irony of the book is that the parents thought they were sending their children out of harm’s way by sparing them the trauma of bombings at home. In most cases, they were sending them to a terrifying early death.

The book lifts the curtain on what it must have…

Bardo

By Emily Gallo ‘67

Stepping into one of Emily Gallo’s novels is like meeting up with old friends.  Bardo is the fifth of her books that I have read, and characters I met before reappear in surprising ways.  Minor characters in one book come into the spotlight in another. Luther, who was finally exonerated of a murder charge after 20 years in prison, finds himself once again unjustly in the crosshairs of the law.    Jeb, the hero of three of the other books, arranges for his friend to lie low in New York with his old mentor, the hard-drinking sardonic Irish writer Finn.

Though both Luther and Finn are at their core generous and empathetic, their surface qualities could not be more different.  Luther is innocent in more ways than one.  Having been locked away for his young adult years, he has trouble keeping up with the…

These are not the Words

By Amanda West Lewis early 60’s

These are not the Words is a lyrical portrayal of growing up in Stuyvesant Town and attending Friends Seminary and then having that idyllic childhood disrupted on the magnitude of being cast out of the Garden of Eden.  Missy, the poetic protagonist, has two hip parents and, shades of Candide, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. She and her best friend Corky love school, (love French!), read Nancy Drew, and go to the Automat. 

Missy’s formal name is Miranda, and she does fancy herself akin to Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest.  A photographer by day and a jazz drummer by night, Missy’s own father emerges as magical and charismatic, waking her up in the middle of the night to whisk her off to Manhattan’s late-night music scene where she is greeted like…