Suspend Your Disbelief

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Charlotte Boulay

Editor at Large

Charlotte Boulay grew up in the Boston area and attended St. Lawrence University. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she taught composition and creative writing for five years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. Foxes on the Trampoline is her first book, and was published in April 2014 by Ecco Press/HarperCollins.


Articles

Reviews |

Stealing Pleasure: Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief Series

by Charlotte Boulay

I’ve come a bit late (only 14 years or so) to the wonder that is Megan Whalen Turner, author of the young adult fantasy series The Queen’s Thief. Of all the books I’ve read in recent memory, not many compare to this series, which is serial narrative of the best kind—the kind that gets richer and more complex as it develops. Before this month, there were three novels: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. A fourth, A Conspiracy of Kings, has just been released. I can’t wait to read it.


Reviews |

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link

by Charlotte Boulay

I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I can’t talk about Kelly Link without talking about the story “Stone Animals,” which first appeared in the Best American Short Stories in 2005, and then in Magic. I still dream about it sometimes. There was a period of almost a year after I first read it when, no matter what else I was reading, I wished it was “Stone Animals.” I’ve read it a dozen times. I sort of want to be reading it right now.


Shop Talk |

new review on FWR: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

by Charlotte Boulay

a taste: I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I […]


Reviews |

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

by Charlotte Boulay

E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.


Reviews |

The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti

by Charlotte Boulay

In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.


Reviews |

YOU'VE GOT TO RE-READ THIS: Moominsummer Madness, by Tove Jansson

by Charlotte Boulay

The first review in FWR’s “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” series. These days there is always something for children to do–often a rather shallow electronic distraction–but Tove Jansson’s Moomin books show readers of all ages that quietly sitting and thinking by yourself is a valuable activity. Her characters let us know that almost everyone is lonely from time to time, and that while community can be an antidote to loneliness, we can also learn from solitude.




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