Dostoevsky’s Devils is a 700-page epic of spiritual lawlessness, conniving, and singularly poor decisions. For most of the novel, this plays out in long conversations, awkward domestic scenes, and some very unfortunate social events. At the climax, everything joins in a conflagration of murders and suicides, with two or three natural deaths for variation in tragedy….
Tag: book reviews
The Crux of the Tragedy
Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. I know because everyone says so. Like most of you, I was compelled to experience his greatness in school, and I did not particularly enjoy it. (It was Othello. I could not work out the math by which the Great Handkerchief Scandal resulted in murder.) Earlier…
Review: Point Horizon
Ever since his family left Virginia for Colorado, Tommy has been at loose ends and out of sorts. He left behind him in Virginia not only his Aunt Maggie, but the pictures she taught him to see and all of his dreams. In Colorado, everything seems dreary, or hostile – the barren plains, the dusty…
Prism Tour Review: The Cinderella Theorem
A themed book tour through Prism Book Tours. Lily Sparrow is an atypical teenager: a teenager who thrives on mathematics, who wants everything clear and logical, who thinks all life should work out to a balanced equation. But when she discovers on her fifteenth birthday that her parents have been leading a double-life in a…
Review: Until That Distant Day
France, in 1792, was an unsafe place, and not only for the king and queen. As revolutionary fever seized the nation, and Paris descended into tumult and violence, everyone’s security became threatened; everyone’s peace melted away. Colette, in the thick of things with her revolutionary brother, finds her spirit drifting away from it. Regretting the…