My recommendation is Powell’s Book Blog. This is full of book reviews and bibliographical information. It is available @ : http://www.powells.com/blog/
The Lagoon by Lilli Carre
Reviewed by John Pistelli
Rain Taxi
Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon opens as bookish young Zoey listens to her grandfather recall the irresistible song of the creature that lives in the black lagoon near their house. Zoey is immune to the creature’s call (she says it sounds like “a cat in a bathtub”), but her uneasily married parents are not, and her mother’s nocturnal sojourn to the lagoon ends in disaster. By the end, Zoey, now living alone with her grandfather, grows older and becomes impatient with the old man’s reminiscences and obsessions. The book fades to black over a silent sequence of eleven pages as a fire the lagoon-creature’s errant cigarette has started in the family’s woodpile sputters out.
The Lagoon’s artisanal craftsmanship and child’s-eye ironies reflect the baffled wisdom of a heroine too young to be foolish. The unfaithful mother and hapless father, while portrayed with some sympathy, nevertheless abandon their child to their own self-involvement, while Zoey, like the nostalgic family-album-style production design of the book itself, represents a fragile redoubt of incorruption………………..
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