Letters to Strabo is therefore both a love story and a coming-of-age tale, set in the late 1970s that takes the form of a fictional odyssey recorded with disarming honesty by my protagonist, an innocent young American writer called Finn Black. His adventures, both funny and evocative, follow closely the itinerary taken by Twain on his own périplus around the Mediterranean a century earlier and are structured around the seventeen chapters of Strabo’s great work. The amazing places Finn visits, the art and cultures he comes across and most importantly the people he meets are faithfully described by him for Eve, the Olana archivist, now his long-distance pen-pal. Eve’s replies, her Letters to Strabo as she calls them, however, not only reveal to Finn her own hopes and dreams but increasingly disturbing glimpses of a tragic past; a past that echoes that of Twain’s two daughters.
literature
Book Review “Lives of the Spirits” John Pappas
Pappas did amazing research for this book and it's clear he wove history and fiction as close to as real as he could get. When I read novels like this, it's important to me that the author stays close to what that time period was really like. I want to time travel to that time with your words. I want the people to look and act like they really would have. Pappas did an outstanding job. I came away feeling like I learned a lot and that's exactly what I wanted.
Book Review “Hands Across The Sky” Andrew John Schmitz
"Hands Across The Sky" is filled with such beautiful imagery that each word is like a brush painting the scenes inside your mind. As the imagery settles, the emotions and senses with each scene settle on you in such an intimate way that it could almost be a memory.
Book Review “Time in a Bubble” Ken Hart
It is the conclusion of the 1970′s. People indulge. It is the end of the Me Generation and the beginning of the era of greed and conservatism. Love, education, resolution, cultural differences, sex, and the finding of a voice drive this third novel of the Ron Tuck Series. With an all girl catholic high school as the setting and the light that comes from internal and external fires as the motivation, Ron discovers the person that he was meant to be and the things that he must leave behind.
Book Review “A Howl for Mayflower” Dan Gilmore
Gilmore has written an intimately unapologetic novel about the holes of selfishness and ideologies we find ourselves hunched in. His characters flaws, attributes and embarrassing urges are laid bare in a fashion that reminds us all that as humans we are complex and perplexing. Our motives a mixed bag in every circumstance.
Book Review “She” Michelle Latiolais
She'd been home-schooled for ten years, and whipped for eleven, and tomorrow she would celebrate her fifteenth birthday. That's why she'd come to Los Angeles, to turn fifteen alone and free in a city she'd never been to before.
