6/27/2023 0 Comments To the Moon and Back by Lisa KohnHer narration is in the form of letters to her husband, Martin, alternated with italicized passages from her journal. Nan, “a fifty-year-old runaway,” takes off from her suburban Boston home and drives west, stopping at motels and cabins, eating at diners, and meeting the locals eventually she gets as far as South Dakota. This one reminded me most of Tyler’s Ladder of Years in that both are about a middle-aged woman who takes a break from her marriage to figure out what she wants from life. She’s comparable to those other Elizabeths, McCracken and Strout, but also to Alice Hoffman and Anne Tyler. This is my second contemporary novel from Berg. The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg (1996) She’s one of our favorite singer-songwriters, though, so this was no problem. In the weeks that I was undertaking this mini reading project, I couldn’t get Krista Detor’s song “All to Do with the Moon” out of my head (on this video, a live recording of the entire “Night Light” suite of three songs, it starts at about 6:15). While these four are in completely different genres – one women’s fiction, one poetry, one memoir and one Booker-winning literary novel – they are all by women (naturally more in touch with the moon?) and all worth reading. I happened to read two books with the word moon in their titles within a couple of weeks in September, which prompted me to ransack my shelves and find two more.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |