Posts Published by Amy Abts

The Time In Between

I was looking for a big juicy well-written novel to start out my 2012. This wasn’t it. My first impressions were hopeful: big, yes, at 609 pages. Juicy? Yes – female lead character who starts…

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The Writer’s Wife

How do you go about writing a character as large as Ernest Hemingway? If you are Paula McLain, you write him as a romantic from the view of his first wife, Hadley. Well, at first…

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Tutsi Picnic

The cover is ugly. The spine features Jonathan Franzen’s name in big block letters, dwarfing the title. I was already sick of the whole Franzen phenomena before I started reading. I barely remember The Corrections,…

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Duluth’s Dark Side

Duluth is the perfect place to set a murder. You’ve got Lake Superior, extreme weather, fascinating history, more lakes, bridges, lots of rocks, tourism and poverty side by side, and big (sometimes tall) ships. Every…

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Hypnotiser of Ladies

I first got interested in J.M Barrie’s involvement with the DuMaurier family after I learned Daphne DuMaurier’s (the famous novelist of Rebecca among others) cousins were the boys Peter Pan was based on. I got…

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The Lost Symbol

note: no spoilers! When philosopher Samuel Taylor coined the term “suspension of disbelief” he intended it to be about the writer rather than the reader. Today, and in this review, it is geared toward the…

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