Old Mole Reading List
65 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsLarry Bowlden reviews contemporary fiction and non-fiction as part of the Old Mole Variety Hour. Monday mornings on KBOO 90.7 fm, Portland, Oregon.
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Episodes
The Heaven and Earth Grocery by James McBride
January 30, 2024 05:11Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian-born theater owner, opens the small town’s first integrated dance hall. His wife Chona runs The Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill, which caters to Blacks and European immigrants, mostly Jewish. Chona is generous and warm-hearted, and though the store makes little profit, she is loved by all the residents of Chicken Hill. All of this wonderful novel, by James McBride, and entitled The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is devoted to the description of the ...
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See
September 25, 2023 19:39This story begins in 1469, in the fifth year of the Chenghua emperor’s reign, when Tan Yunxian was eight years old. So begins Lisa See’s superb account of Chinese medicine in the 15th century. On one level it is a simple story of a girl, Tan, who wants to become a doctor and is tutored by her grandparents who are both doctors. Her best friend Meiling is in training to be a midwife, and the two girls pursue their dreams under the kind but demanding eyes of Tan’s grandparents. The book is wo...
Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee
August 14, 2023 20:03We are told not to judge a book by its, cover, but I invite you to judge this book by its delicious cover, the content as rich and colorful as its cover. Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, is deeply insightful, sad and transformative. The book begins and ends with the same refrain: I live my life forward and backward. Seems like my body remembers what I can’t afford to forget Here I am alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it. Ranita Atwater is...
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
July 03, 2023 20:291900, Travancore, South India She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together. “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.” So begins Abraham Verghese’s masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, ...
River Sing Me Home by Elenor Shearer
May 15, 2023 20:21Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel: My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery—a place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some terms—such as “mulatto” and “Neg...
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
April 03, 2023 19:25The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance: First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye ...
One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro
March 06, 2023 20:53Joy Castro is a brilliant writer of historical fiction. Many of you readers will know her for her novel Flight Risk. Today I want to talk to you about her 2023 novel, One Brilliant Flame. In her afterward entitled “Gratitude”, she explains part of her motive for writing the book: For most of my life—and I am fifty-four now—I knew nothing about the political history of Key West or its importance as a rebel base for the anti-colonial insurgency in Cuba. It is a moment in US history that has...
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley
January 23, 2023 20:11Most readers know of Walter Mosley via his masterful Easy Rawlins mystery series. His faithful readers would no doubt hurry to get hold of a new book in that series, but my hunch is that Mosley wanted to speak with a different voice than the relatively well off Easy Rawlins who has both money and muscles on his side. Instead, the hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is Socrates Fortlow, a man of the streets, a convicted murderer who spent twenty-seven years in jail and has been out ...
A Tribute to Novelist Sue Miller
December 20, 2022 03:31Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author. I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father. The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that convic...
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
November 21, 2022 22:06I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has b...
Monogamy by Sue Miller
September 05, 2022 22:06He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful. Yet not entirely faithful. Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda. Because he’s done it again. Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities. In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for y...
The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah
August 01, 2022 22:14Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualit...
Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt
July 04, 2022 21:13Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City. In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids ...
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
May 23, 2022 21:58Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful. Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be. The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by...
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
April 18, 2022 21:39Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world Apply in person This ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is. Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see...
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
March 21, 2022 21:27Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and ...
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab
January 03, 2022 21:16Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab. The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719: The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a stor...
The Hidden Child by Louise Fein
December 13, 2021 20:52If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child. Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel, frolicking in a ...
Oh William by Elizabeth Strout
November 01, 2021 19:05Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh William And then I thought, Oh William! But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in the wor...
A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
October 18, 2021 18:33It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, ...
Attachments by Jeff Arch
August 30, 2021 18:20This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at th...
Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar
August 02, 2021 17:30It’s 1979, Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist. Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so i...
Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
June 28, 2021 18:04Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba. The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to ap...
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
May 24, 2021 16:00What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.” This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day sim...
Blood Grove by Walter Mosley
March 29, 2021 19:55Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove. I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe. In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their...
The Orphan’s Tale by Pam Jenoff
January 25, 2021 20:42I know next to nothing about circuses or aerialists, but reading Pam Jenoff’s fascinating novel, The Orphan’s Tale has me wanting to know lots more about both. This novel is about two women who, for very different reasons are on the run during WWII. Noa is a young woman whose parents have kicked her out of her home because of an unwed pregnancy. The girls’ home where I lived after my parents found out I was expecting and kicked me out had been located far from anywhere in the name of disc...
The Puzzle Women by Anna Ellory
November 16, 2020 20:27There are three narrative voice in this novel: Lotte, a young girl with Downs syndrome; her older brother Rune, whom she calls Roo; and the ghostly voice of their mother that comes to them only in words written long before. To give a rapid sketch of the novel without giving away too much, it moves back and forth between Then, January 1989, and Now, 1999. And from West Germany to East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall. Mama has tried to escape with her children many times,...
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
October 19, 2020 20:55The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 percent of the human race. This quote from the author’s note about her novel The Pull of the Stars set the scene for this gripping and beautiful book. Many of you will know about Emma Donoghue because of her novel, Room, which was made into a movie. I was very impressed with that novel, but honestly have found other of her novels even more impressive. Donoghue is a writer of immense talent and a...
Relative Fortunes and Passing Fancies by Marlowe Benn
September 15, 2020 03:18Recently, it was suggested to me that I buy two novels as companion pieces; Relative Fortunes, and Passing Fancies, both written by Marlow Benn. They are indeed companion novels, and so I am recommending them to you as a pair. While in one sense, they are light reading, in fact there is much substance to each of the novels. They take place in 1920s Manhattan. You should read Relative Fortunes first, and I suggest that you then move directly to Passing Fancies. The heroine is an elegant a...
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
September 01, 2020 00:33I want to talk to you today about a truly extraordinary debut novel by a Nigerian author. The title of the book is, The Girl With the Louding Voice and the name of this incredible new voice in literature is Abi Dare. The book won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018, and fortunately for us readers, it was published in 2020. It is the story of a fourteen year old Nigerian girl, Adunni. When her mother dies young, her penniless father takes her out of school and sells her...
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
July 28, 2020 00:12I want to talk to you today about a 2020 novel by Brit Bennett entitled, The Vanishing Half. It is the story of twin girls who run away from a small town when they are sixteen, and only one of them returns fourteen years later; the vanishing half, Stella, is missed and searched for by Desiree, the twin who returned. The small town from which they run is named Mallard. It was a strange town. Mallard, named after the ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes. A town that like...
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl by Catherine Ryan Hyde
June 22, 2020 16:00I started whispering in her ear, but so quiet I wasn’t sure she could even hear me. It was more like making the words with my lips against her ear, but then just this tiny breath of air that was the sound. I said, “Brave girl, quiet girl.” She said it back to me, just as quiet, which really surprised me. She stopped her run-up to that big cry and whispered back to me, “Brave girl, kiet girl,” right in my ear. She didn’t really get the kw sound in quiet—I think she was too young to have go...
Late In The Day by Tessa Hadley
May 26, 2020 00:49It is always such a pleasure to stumble onto a writer previously unknown who absolutely commands attention. Tess Hadley is such a writer. Today I want to talk about her 2019 novel Late in the Day. I am so struck with her writing and her wisdom that I find trying to review her work daunting, and I’m not at all sure I’m up to the task. Like the great author, Elizabeth Bowen, whom Hadley deeply admires, Hadley writes primarily, even exclusively, about domestic scenes. While her characters may ...
Wild Life by Molly Gloss
May 11, 2020 16:44I admit I was pierced with loneliness. There is something about a lighted room when you are standing outside it in the cold night. Good morning readers. Although I was already aware of what a fine writer Molly Gloss is from having read her novel Jump-Off Creek, I must admit I was stunned by the depth of her wisdom in her 2000 novel Wild Life. Writing as Charlotte Bridger Drummond, or simply C.B.D., Gloss creates a character who is tough, independent, and a fully fledged feminist. Set in the...
A Piece Of The World by Christina Baker Kline
April 27, 2020 16:29Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones. Christina Baker Kline was fascinated with Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World from the time she was a little girl, and the fascination remai...
The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld
March 31, 2020 00:10I want to talk to you today about a book that is at once extremely sad and incredibly lovely. The book is The Butterfly Girl, by Rene Denfeld. Ms. Denfeld is an author, journalist and licensed public defense investigator. I have previously reviewed her other two novels, The Enchanted, about death-row inmates, and The Child Finder. I won’t tell you too much about the story-line since it is a kind of mystery, and I would not want to be a spoiler. There are two primary narrators in this novel...
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
February 18, 2020 02:12p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} In a wonderfully perceptive and often humorous debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid takes on issues of race and class in a delightfully light-handed way. It is the story of two women, a white woman, Alix Chamberlain who writes a kind of inspirational blog urging women to take power in the workplace, and a twenty-five year old black woman, Emira, who...
The Song of the Jade Lily by Kirsty Manning
January 06, 2020 18:03p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} This long and beautifully constructed novel bounces back and forth between Vienna in the late 30s and early 40s, Melbourne 2016, and Shanghai (also in the late 30s and 40s). It is the story of a friendship between a beautiful Shanghai girl, Li, and a Jewish refugee, Romy. They meet in Shanghai in 1939. The two become instant best friends who explore ...
Every Thing You Are by Kerry Anne King
December 09, 2019 18:44I want to talk to you this morning about a delightful book about a luthier (maker of violins and other stringed instruments), his granddaughter, and a cello with a soul. When Braden Healy’s mother takes him to a violin shop to buy him a violin, a cello across the room beckons him, speaks to him, and so begins a love affair that will last a lifetime. Ophelia MacPhee, Phee for short, is eighteen years old and has been working in her grandfather’s shop, MacPhee’s Fine Instruments, for many y...
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
November 11, 2019 23:06p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} For almost all of my reading life, I have tended to prejudge pop novels and pop novelists. Certainly, that prejudice has saved me from reading many bad or so-so novels, but it has also led me to miss some real gems. Today, I am going to say a few words about two 2019 novels. Although I don’t intend to reveal much of the storylines, I want at least...
Don’t Skip Out On Me by Will Vlautin
October 07, 2019 20:11p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} I want to talk to you this morning about a book that simply fell in my lap, loaned me by a reader friend. The book, Don’t Skip Out On Me, by Willy Valautin is not one I would have picked up on my own. For one thing it is a book about a boxer, and I don’t care for boxing. It is also one that is written in simple, almost flat prose, and I tend to favor bo...
Other Men’s Daughters by Richard Stern
August 26, 2019 17:54I am surprised that I somehow missed Richard Stern’s 1973 novel, Other Men’s Daughters. Stern is a writer of great power and an almost unbelievable master of vocabulary. Like John William’s novel, Stoner, this is in many ways a quiet novel, and again as in William’s novel there is an undercurrent of probably unintentional sexism that runs through it, though I think both Williams and Stern would have denied ithis. The lead character is almost always referred to as Dr. Merriwether; he is a p...
Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume
August 05, 2019 17:34He is running, running running. And it’s like no kind of running he’s ever done before. He’s the surge that burst the dam and he’s pouring down the hillslope. This time, there’ no chance to sniff and scavenge and scoff. There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, he’s further than he’s ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart. He is ...
The Things We Don’t Say by Ella Carey
June 25, 2019 02:34p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} Those of you readers who have read earlier works of Ella Carey know that she has had a lifelong love-affair with France (as is manifest in Paris Time Capsule and The House by the Lake). In her 2018 novel, The Things We Don’t Say, the action switches back and forth between London and a country farm house in Provence. As Carey is quick to acknowledg...
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
May 27, 2019 22:03p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} I’ve been waiting for years for a new book from Jhumpa Lahiri, but somehow missed her latest novel, The Lowland, published in 2013. Like her other three books, this is a masterful piece of writing—lyrical and lovely, but telling a very somber story. Two brothers Subhash and Udayan are just fifteen months apart, and their bond is incredibly strong...
When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
April 09, 2019 03:34p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} It’s nice sometimes to read a book just for the delight of it; When God Was a Rabbit is full of delight as well as some wonderful observations on life. I’m sure a lot of you will remember Judy Blume’s wonderful little novel: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Winman’s novel is in that lofty company. It’s a book about a young girl, Elly, and h...
Girl In The River by Patricia Kullberg
February 11, 2019 21:34It is with great pleasure that I talk with you this morning about a splendid novel by a good friend and fellow Old Mole, Patricia Kullberg. I’m not sure how this novel slipped by me in 2015, but it did. While at lunch with another Portland feminist and leftist, Johanna Brenner, in the course of our conversation Johanna asked, “Have you read Patsy’s novel?” No, I was ashamed to say, I had not, and could not really recall it ever being mentioned to me. The novel is Girl in the River, and besi...
Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain
December 17, 2018 21:26I want to review for you an excellent though often very sad novel by Diane Chamberlain, Necessary Lies. There are two primary narrative voices. Ivy, a fifteen year old girl who lives on a tobacco farm and takes care of her intellectually challenged sister, Mary Ella, her grandmother whom everyone calls Nonnie, and her nephew, Baby William, Mary Ella’s infant son. Jane, the other narrator, is a recently employed social worker for the state of North Carolina, and Ivy, her sister and the hou...
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
November 19, 2018 21:16I think Barbara Kingsolver is one of the most important and socially significant authors of the last fifty years. Her latest novel Unsheltered is not a happy read, but it important and very relevant to our times. Kingsolver is a fine scientist as she shows in her essays, High Tide in Tucson as well as in her many novels. Indeed, the science asides in this latest novel are fascinating even when not essential to the plot. The novel is really two stories, one occurring at the end of the 19th ...
Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
September 24, 2018 20:54If you have not yet read Colm Toibin, you are in for a treat. Not long ago, I reviewed his magnificent novel, Brooklyn, and today I want to talk to you about another stunning novel, Nora Webster. This is a novel that closely describes the inner mind of a woman, Nora, who, widowed in her late forties, is sole responsible for her home and her four children, only two of whom still live at home. In my experience as a reader, I rarely find male authors who create believable women characters. To...