In the Old Testament, God repeatedly warns that the sins of the fathers will fall upon their children, “even to the third and fourth generation.” Ann Patchett explores this notion in Commonwealth. When an uninvited party guest makes a pass at the host’s wife, two families are ripped asunder, leaving the children to bear the consequences.

Commonwealth is a brilliant novel focusing largely upon six children forced to patch together a new family from the shreds of two tattered ones. I was...

There are so many reasons to read Good People that a book review can’t do them justice. Patmeena Sabit’s unique narrative approach is critical to this exploration of a family tragedy aggravated by suspicions, xenophobia, and hearsay.

Instead of using a single narrator, the novel relies on family members, friends, acquaintances, witnesses, news reports, and public officials to tell the story of the Sharaf family. The father, who has immigrated to the US from Afghanistan, rises from a cleaner of...

Everything seems wrong in Ginny Polk’s life, from her bitter relationship with her mother to her inappropriate romance with Roscoe Simms, warden of Greenmount State Penitentiary in 1950s Louisiana. Ginny even bears scars from her childhood, when she witnessed the electrocution of the man convicted of killing her father. It’s to Ginny’s credit that she attempts to beautify her ugly environment, by cooking special last meals for the condemned prisoners.

Even those meals sound like cruel and...