Book Reviews

Book Review

By |

Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman

This is a startling book. For those of us in an older generation, it will be uncomfortable. It is skillfully written, though certainly not a Pulitzer Prize winner, portraying an event and its aftermath in the lives of three 18-year-olds. The girls have just graduated from high school and are spending the summer in Greece, at the vacation home of one of their families. The narrator, Bess, is the least affluent and the least confident of the trio, cursed in a sense with an overactive conscience.

Book Reviews

Book Review

By |

What an extraordinary piece of writing–though not one for easy reading when you’re tired, or for passing the time in an airport while waiting for a flight.

Book Reviews

Former Resident Authors Book

By |

Flowers Are Better Than Bullets By Rod Dillman Kindle Edition 364 pages 2023

This book was written, and apparently self-published, by a former resident of Suffield. It is a debut novel and a book of great emotional strength. Its power derives from the author’s passion for telling his story, which one suspects is grounded in personal experience. It is essentially the story of what happened at Kent State University during the Vietnam War, the shooting of several students who were engaged in a protest against the war, killing four and maiming nine others. If Rod Dillman was not a student at Kent State during this period, then he deserves all the more credit for portraying it so convincingly.