Getting it Down on the Page, Fearlessly: Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom by Charles Holdefer

Sometimes, an image can perfectly illustrate a narrative while leaving itself open to ambiguities. Think Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, or Jay Gatsby’s green light. In Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom, the protagonist, Betty Block (née Bird), lives in the shadow of her formidable artist mother, Violet Flowers, whose famous work, The Creation of Violet, is based on an exact replica of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling … Continue reading Getting it Down on the Page, Fearlessly: Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom by Charles Holdefer

Curtis Smith’s Deaf Heaven Explores the Hunger for a Moral Compass in an Immoral Society by Charles Holdefer

Politically timely novels in the twenty-first century are largely accidental. The novel business is slow, while the news cycle runs faster and faster. Despite our much-vaunted technical progress, the lag time between signing a book contract and the book’s actual release is longer than it was a generation ago, and compared to previous generations, the pace is glacial. (For instance, despite wartime paper-rationing, George Orwell’s … Continue reading Curtis Smith’s Deaf Heaven Explores the Hunger for a Moral Compass in an Immoral Society by Charles Holdefer