Still Life With Bread Crumbs
By Anna Quindlen
Random House
252 pages, $26
Guests on Earth
By Lee Smith
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
337 pages, $25.95
By Karen Brady
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
Women on their own – by circumstance, not choice – are at the heart of two intriguing new novels by veteran authors Anna Quindlen and Lee Smith.
Neither writer, alas, is at the top of her game here but both Quindlen’s “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” and Smith’s “Guests on Earth” have pockets of excellence, and provocative story lines – Quindlen’s a telling yet witty tale for our times, Smith’s a heartfelt piece of historical fiction.
It is “Guests on Earth” that purports, at first, to be the more interesting of the two, giving us a young narrator, Evalina Toussaint, who is sent, while still a child, to Highland Hospital, in Asheville, N.C. The year is 1937 and Highland – a well-known sanitorium for individuals with mental
Article source: http://www.buffalonews.com/life-arts/book-reviews/quindlen-still-life-with-bread-crumbs-lee-smith-guests-on-earth-20140209