Friday, May 9th   The Outlander by Gil Adamson

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Into the Wild A Review by Ron Charles Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page: Men with hounds are chasing a young woman through the woods at night. Nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton has murdered her husband and now, still wearing a black mourning dress made from curtains, she's running from her brothers-in-law, massive, red-headed twins with rifles across their backs. Welcome to The Outlander, an absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. Of course, the Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature, a staple of television dramas and horror films (the dark street, those panicked backward glances, that plaintive cry: "Oh, why did I wear these heels?!"). But Gil is short for Gillian, and her strange and complicated heroine has nothing in common with Hollywood's worn-out damsels in distress. For almost 400 pages, we follow "the widow's peculiar trajectory into the wild. The route like a skittering...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger The Old Frontiers A Review by Alan Taylor In 1893, more than twelve million Americans traveled to Chicago to attend a national exposition celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus's voyage of American discovery. "The World's Columbian Exposition" summoned Americans to celebrate the astonishing rapidity of their own ascent to continental dominance and international power. Barely one hundred years old, the United States had spread westward across North America to become one of the great powers on the earth, a nation capable of exerting influence and might throughout the Americas and across the Pacific to Asia. That expansion and...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online				The Region of Lost Names by Fred Arroyo Not Just a Love Story A Review by Rigoberto González The Region of Lost Names by debut novelist Fred Arroyo tells the touching tale of Ernest and Magdalene, star-crossed lovers separated by conflicts that predate their families' migration from Puerto Rico. College-educated and building careers in the Midwest, the two discover that they are not immune to repeating their parents' mistakes -- though, unlike their elders, they hope to earn forgiveness for the errors of their ways. Ernest grows up in an agricultural town in Michigan, where his manhood is shaped by the burdens of hard labor and by his cruel co-workers, including Changó, his...   Read the entire review More reviews from National Book Critics Circle
Life on the Mississippi (Modern Library Classics) by Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi: A Review [Ed. note: This review was published in the Atlantic Monthly, September 1883.] Of the first fifteen chapters of Mr. Clemens's book, twelve are reprinted from The Atlantic; but they are so full of entertaining and instructive matter that they will repay a second reading. In the three introductory ones which precede these, the physical character of the river is sketched, and brief reference is made to the early travelers and explorers of the stream, -- De Soto, Marquette, and La Salle; these latter belonging to the epoch of what Mr. Clemens quaintly calls "historical history," as...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly				Lush Life: A Novel by Richard Price In Priceland A Review by Michael Chabon 1. The protagonists of Richard Price's first four novels suffer from the fatal weakness of character known to moralists, comedians, writers of tragedy, and bullshit artists as New York City. Brash and withdrawn; hangdog and prone to delusions of grandeur; cynical and compassionate; fixated on the quick score, the next hit; lousy with moments of grace and of violence; ineffectual yet capable of anything; hilarious and sad; speaking a rapid-fire Yiddish-Italian-black creole of poetry, bullshit, and monte-shark patter, New York City defines the Price hero. It gives him shape, explains him...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich Tree of Life A Review by Diana Postlethwaite At the heart of Louise Erdrich's incandescent novel stands a tree. Roots deep in the North Dakota soil, it's the family tree of generations of "bold and passionate" French-Chippewa Métis peoples and the more earthbound German and Norwegian immigrants who live in and around the small town of Pluto. Ringed with mating and mayhem, friendship and betrayal, stories shared and secrets kept, this tree spreads its branches through the pages of Erdrich's book: from a gritty, colorful adventure of 19th-century town-site expeditioners one arctic winter to the rueful, darkly comic sexual explorations of ...   Read the entire review More reviews from Ms. Magazine				The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng War and (Inner) Peace A Review by Gerry Donaghy "I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me." So begins Tan Twan Eng's novel set in Penang, a small island off the Malaya peninsula prior to the start of World War II. Actually, the novel is set in the present day, with an elderly Phillip Hutton, the Chinese-English scion of a successful businessman, reflecting on his life. This act of remembrance is triggered by the arrival of a stranger bearing an ancient samurai sword that once belonged to his Aikido sensei Hayato Endo. Endo was a Japanese diplomat who rented an island from Hutton's...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com