When a writer decides to base his novel’s plot around a middle-class Jewish kid’s coming of age adventure on Long Island in 1970, it’s not a promising sign.
“The world that Mytting brings the reader into is a lost world of simplicity and harshness and a stunning beauty where almost everything is within plain sight, and yet almost nothing can be
“an entrancing family story and a surprising adventure. Gregory’s female characters are, as always, clearly human, deeply thoughtful, and driven by their own desires and agency.
“Mother for Dinner is a deeply uncomfortable novel. At times, it’s funny. At others, it’s a too-accurate examination of family ties. It’s also. . . about eating human flesh . . .
“The Boy in the Field is a literary mystery novel. . . . Just not the kind that focuses on what happens on a patch of land, a highway, or even a country.
Perhaps any novel that takes place largely in the minds of octogenarians and an arguably distraught—possibly disturbed—single mother may seem to wander over wide psychic territory.
