Patrick Reardon

    Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is one of those great works of literature that demands re-reading.  Once through isn’t enough. There is just too much going [...]

  “Long John” Wentworth, Chicago’s 6 foot-6-inch mayor, wanted to be Abraham Lincoln’s political boss. But Lincoln wasn’t biting. In late April, 1860, the Illinois Republican wrote to a political [...]

Like Odysseus, the Ift warrior Ayyar spends much of Victory on Janus in long, eventful journeying. For 48 pages — nearly 20 percent — of Andre Norton’s 1966 science fiction [...]

Naill Renfro has the Green Sick and has been exiled into the great, dark forest.  He awakens from a fever dream and drags himself to a nearby pool for a [...]

Adam Levin’s 2010 novel The Instructions is nothing if not ambitious. Weighing in at 1,030 pages, it deals deeply with the interior lives of pre-teens, the hair-splitting debates of Torah [...]

There is a temptation to start off this review with a pun, but no dice.  I know that I’m nowhere near as good at it as Terry Pratchett, as he [...]

When Bill Sikes is introduced in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes him thusly: “The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black [...]

Elmore Leonard’s first novel The Bounty Hunters was published in 1953, just eight years after World War II, and it was part of a movement in American arts to reevaluate [...]

The Song of Songs is one of three very odd books in the Bible.  Ecclesiastes expresses a deep mournful existential angst not found anywhere else in the Jewish and Christian [...]