Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEW: Weyward by Emilia Hart

BOOK REVIEW: Weyward by Emilia Hart

Weyward is a lovely three point-of-view debut novel about three women who exist four centuries apart (Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019). Their timelines and lives are intertwined and connected by their common family history, their struggle with evil in...

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BOOK REVIEW: Afraid to Let Grow by Annette Nauraine

BOOK REVIEW: Afraid to Let Grow by Annette Nauraine

Afraid to Let Grow is the second in the Marriage Survivors Club series, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without having read the prequel (In the Beginning) or the first in the series (Do Over Daughter). The series involves the intertwined stories of a...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Whip by Karen Kondazian

BOOK REVIEW: The Whip by Karen Kondazian

The Whip is a fictionalized biography of a famous Wells Fargo stagecoach driver in California. Charlotte Parkhurst (1812-1879) is dropped at an orphanage as an infant. She soon bonds with a boy named Lee Colton who assumes the role of her protector and best friend,...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis

BOOK REVIEW: The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis

The Stolen Queen is a dual-time line story split between Egypt in 1936 and New York in 1978. In the earlier timeline, Charlotte Cross, a budding archeologist, falls in love with a fellow Egyptologist then faces an horrific tragedy that upends her life. She returns to...

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BOOK REVIEW: Saltwater by Katy Hays

BOOK REVIEW: Saltwater by Katy Hays

Give me a good thriller or mystery, and I can generally just rip right through it. Saltwater started off so slowly that I had to drag myself to finish it. The characters, for the most part, were entirely despicable, spoiled, and unrelatable. Helen, whose mother died...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Injustice of Valor by  Gary Corbin

BOOK REVIEW: The Injustice of Valor by Gary Corbin

Valorie (Val) Dawes, a rookie cop, has been on duty less than two years and has already fired her weapon multiple times—with two fatalities. As a rookie, she faces the usual harassment of any younger cop by older policemen as well as the rampant sexism in her...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley

BOOK REVIEW: The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley

In The Shadowy Horses, author Kearsley weaves together past and present in a dark gothic mystery. Archaeologist Verity Grey is in Scotland for a job interview and ends up staying, though her boss—Peter Quinnell, an infamous archaeologist—is eccentric, if not crazy,...

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BOOK REVIEW: Clever Little Thing by Helena Echlin

BOOK REVIEW: Clever Little Thing by Helena Echlin

Helena Echlin’s Clever Little Thing is a devourable psychological thriller full of plot twist after plot twist, lie after lie. Echlin keeps the tension up through tight prose that reveal the main character, Charlotte’s, state of mind, a woman walking on the edge yet...

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BOOK REVIEW: Tangles by Kay Smith-Blum

BOOK REVIEW: Tangles by Kay Smith-Blum

I recently read The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, a nonfiction book that deals with with America’s part in the race towards atomic weaponry across the US and Europe but doesn’t handle the human...

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BOOK REVIEW: In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani

BOOK REVIEW: In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani

In the Country of Others is about Mathilde, a young Catholic French woman, falls in love with Amine Belhaj, a Muslim Moroccan soldier who is fighting in France during World War II. She moves to Morocco when he is released from his military service. Briefly they live...

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BOOK REVIEW: Dust  Bowl by Donald Worster

BOOK REVIEW: Dust Bowl by Donald Worster

As someone whose ranching family lived through the Dust Bowl and its series of droughts to the point of nearly losing land that had been in the family since the 1870s, I found Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s fascinating. Author Worster does a bang-up job...

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BOOK REVIEW: Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton

BOOK REVIEW: Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton

I am not usually one for humorous books, but Tartufo caught my eye, largely because it is set in Italy where I lived for a number of years. The village of Lazzarini Boscarino is dying. Young folks have all left, heading to Milan or other big cities. The old mayor died...

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