Caitlin Van Horn

Memoirs have probably been criticized for just about as long as they’ve been written. They evoke two common questions: “Is it true?” and “Does it matter?” If "no" were the answer to both with regards to If Only You People Could Follow Directions…

Let's get the first, painful thing out of the way. Cindy: Please change your subtitle. I get it, I do. It’s quick, it’s snappy — it even rhymes! It’s a nice exclamation point to the title of your new book when it’s said all together: The Longest…

You might be familiar with Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With The Amber Eyes, but it’s his grandmother, Elisabeth, and her novel, The Exiles Return (Picador), who has been getting recent literary buzz. According to her grandson, Elisabeth de…

I was going to call Mark Haskell Smith's Raw: A Love Story (Grove) “Kafkaesque”, but according to Harriet, one of the novel’s protagonists: [Kafka] was an overused cliché when things got weird. […] Circumstances conspire, misunderstandings emerge,…

Elizabeth Speller's The First of July is not a political novel. Though it's set in World War I (and the tense year leading up to it), there are no chapters devoted to shifting alliances, or how the assassination of one Archduke lead to a war that…

Midway through Someone Else’s Love Story (William Morrow), astute readers may experience a sinking feeling, and that’s the realization that this seemingly charming, funny novel is passing the Bechdel test by the skin of its teeth. The Bechdel test,…

The domestic drama — a story of realistic, middle-class, ordinary, everyday lives with a family or home—has been around for a while (just look at all those Pride and Prejudice remakes and spinoffs). Allegedly, audiences are supposed to relate best…

Hold on to your wedding veils — in Ronald Frame’s Havisham (Picador), everybody’s favorite spinster gets a makeover. You may last remember seeing Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (probably in 9th grade English), but Frame has…