Hearing that a fellow North Carolinian author had written a surprising fictional bestseller, I was curious to see if she would produce something closer to Where the Crawdads sing, a dark and satisfying murder epic, or possibly Safe Haven, a romantic thrill ride that was the high point of Nicholas’ Sparks career. Instead, after reading it, I felt quite figuratively but emotionally like I was dying on a boat, not by drowning, but by sunburn. A friend once criticized one of my

“Feminine intuition” may not be a perfect compass, but it led Olivia Rodrigo here, and here is a good place. The Filipina-American female former acolyte of Taylor Swift has shed the rock-chick cosplaying and come into her own on the unfortunately-named “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love,” which was a factor in this reviewer’s 3-star review of her work, because a title is supposed to be a capture of the whole work, and in this case, the title is an overlong hindrance f

The literary world was shocked when an unassuming book about an old man who waltzed around a small Southern town called Golden became a multimillion-selling bestseller. The Wall Street Journal said it “broke every convention” of publishing. Yes, when every convention of publishing is to treat every old white man as a form of societal cancer. Somehow, an elder lawyer named Allen Levi, (a Christian at that!) convinced a publisher to give his book a try, and the result – altho