Morgan M

BookBrowse Reviewer

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BookBrowse Reviewer Morgan is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

Morgan is a reader and writer living in Los Angeles. She reviews fiction online, writes for Book Riot and The Paris Review, and is an Associate Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She blogs at Reading in LA, and plans to open a bookstore called Dead or Alive. She figures that Donna Tartt probably owes her about $1,000 in royalties by now, due to her ceaseless recommending of The Secret History to pretty much everyone she meets.

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (13)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Your Face in Mine
by Jess Row

(8/13/2014)

The beautifully controlled language helps keep a fairly outlandish plot seem entirely plausible, but in the end what truly grounds readers in the world we know is the smaller story beneath the larger one: the story of childhood friends, how they change us, and what becomes of them.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Search
by Geoff Dyer

(7/23/2014)

The Search should garner a strong American audience, having as it does all the makings of a good hardboiled detective story. All together, you get what amounts to a Salvador Dali painting in novel form. That is, it gives the distinct impression of taking place in a world almost like this one, but somehow not quite. Read this book.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Red Now and Laters
by Marcus J. Guillory

(5/7/2014)

With a luscious Louisiana Creole always percolating below the Southern-spiked black urban dialect, the language is as rich and textured as the landscape Guillory evokes, reminding one of Faulkner's famous line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The whole novel, in fact, can be read as an exploration of Faulkner's contention. Ti'John must learn to incorporate the past into his life, or else be haunted by it, in his case quite literally. Much as he might wish to turn a blind eye to the

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Blazing World
by Siri Hustvedt

(3/19/2014)

The theme that carries through is a concern with how and why we look at things the way we do. We realize that, alas, this perception is the only truth. Of course, nowhere is the idea more heightened than in the art world, where the commodification of image means the difference between success and failure, and where artworks accrue merit based on the perceived "value" of the artists themselves. After all, what makes something Art? Siri Hustvedt has written a superb, important, and wildly engrossi

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Last Days of California: A Novel
by Mary Miller

(1/22/2014)

I challenge anyone to read Mary Miller's The Last Days of California and not find some personal resonance in the backseat of that apocalypse-bound wagon. That's because underneath Miller's road trip novel is the age-old story we all lived through: the one where you discover your parents are human.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Woke Up Lonely
by Fiona Maazel

(6/19/2013)

There are a few writers I love, and gorge on, simply for their writing; they could spend eleven pages describing a teacup and I'd be on board, salivating for more. The list is short: David Foster Wallace, Gertrude Stein, Cintra Wilson. And now: Fiona Maazel. I would go anywhere with Maazel. Whether you're as enchanted by her language as I am or not (though I promise, she will enchant you), Woke Up Lonely is a spectacular novel. You must read it.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Shelter Cycle
by Peter Rock

(5/8/2013)

One of the most interesting questions the novel poses is this: of the things that we say, which do we believe? And which do we simply believe we believe? Rock makes clear that there is a difference with the juxtaposition of Francine's voice vs. Colville's: the indoctrinated vs. the true believer.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Middle Men: Stories
by Jim Gavin

(2/20/2013)

The beauty in this collection is that we meet Jim Gavin's characters not when their lives are opening up (which of course makes for a nice, if easy, story), but when they're constricting, winnowing down into themselves to find their core, however meager yet unmistakably their own that core turns out to be.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Magnificence
by Lydia Millet

(1/23/2013)

Magnificence is, like much of her work, aware of the issues close to the author’s heart - environmental degradation, extinction of languages and cultures, the decline of biodiversity - but anyone who’d call it, or any of her novels, “activist” is missing exactly what makes them anathema to that kind of writing: Millet’s fierce loyalty to character. Magnificence is painfully, wincingly, hilariously human.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
by Andrew Solomon

(11/28/2012)

Far From the Tree felt, for this reader anyway, not only inspiring and compelling, but also personal because of its inclusive message. "Difference is what unites us," Andrew Solomon says. "While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state." Solomon is a champion of and for people with differences, and s

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Lola Quartet
by Emily St. John Mandel

(5/9/2012)

I suppose the novel will be called a mystery, and it certainly is structured as such. But Mandel's writing includes essences of noir and of the socially conscious novel, and she achieves - through effortless shifts in point of view, and a sparseness that indicates a real sense of sophistication - a highly literary novel.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories
by Megan Mayhew Bergman

(3/7/2012)

I haven't read a collection this deeply affecting and, for lack of a better word, real, since Alan Heathcock's Volt, and before that, it had been a long time since a short story stunned me into submission with its humanity. Yes, humanity. Bergman's stories are swarming with nature - with oceans, wildlife, biology, the whole mess of planet Earth - but their real strength comes from how they're always able to distill it down, again and again, to us: our own, singular, one-shot human lives,

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel
by Julian Barnes

(1/11/2012)

This is heavy business, but Barnes lays it flat out, no stylistic wand-waving, no tricks. He writes in an everyman's lingo with such unapologetic, razor-edged insight, that somehow his prose amounts to a kind of alchemy, putting, as if by magic, words to all those questions simmering away at the back of our minds.

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