NBCC member Katharine Weber’s pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:
I admired Charlotte Bacon’s “Split Estate” enormously, for sensibility, for characters who absolutely live, and for really wonderful writing page to page. It’s a novel that keeps offering the reader something that seems familiar but turns out to be strange, time and again. The many convincing surprises make this one of those life-improving novels that make you happy as you go about your day that you are in the middle of reading it and will soon be returning to those pages. I don’t know why Bacon is not more well known, or why this novel has not made a larger impression since publication, because she is the kind of writer and this is the kind of novel absolutely deserving of a great deal more attention from critics and readers who appreciate excellent fiction.—Katharine Weber