by Emma Schneider

The Parallel Apartments – Bill Cotter

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I laughed aloud more than once, but I also had to close the book at one point to stem my nausea.

Three Strong Women – Marie NDiaye

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NDiaye’s women are not strong due to their ability to overcome their trials or by doing something extraordinary.

The Age of Miracles – Karen Thompson Walker

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Walker’s prose, like her imagining, is competent, but also rather predictable.

Stairs and Stares: A Look at Downton Abbey and its Ancestry

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There is something doubly satisfying about watching a program which allows modern viewers to imagine themselves both as a lounging aristocrat and as a hyper-attentive servant.

Rare Earth – Paul Mason

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Rather than leaving readers to guess what has been left out, as in a news article, Rare Earth forces readers to filter reality through its virile, imaginative expanse.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy – Margot Livesey

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Livesey takes some of the fire out of Brontë’s novel without fully justifying her milder, more sentimental take.

Child Wonder – Roy Jacobsen

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Trouble is, when you start observing, you start seeing all the mistakes. CHILD WONDER is the story of a person teetering on the brink, trying to figure out “how to lose one’s innocence without losing one’s soul.”

Red Shift – Alan Garner

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Garner explores the troubling demystification that results from understanding—the lurch of realigning one’s imagined truth with someone else’s reality.

A Timely Path to Imagination

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Creativity of mind is what imbues literacy with value and life. As such, our society needs nothing more than the imagining inspired by children’s writers such as E. Nesbit, Alison Uttley, and so many other half-forgotten names. To rediscover old books is to explore overgrown paths and rebuild toppled towers.

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Monique Raffey

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Encompassing fifty years, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle introduces readers to the birth and early development of independence in Trinidad through the life story of an expatriate couple who arrived as colonialism left.