As always, Kathryn Gauci's research is impeccable as she returns to the Middle East with Midnight in Istanbul after her last book being set in the Pyrenees. She really captures the atmosphere of Istanbul, its food and culture, as well as its post-Ataturk cosmopolitan...
Divine Might is not a retelling of the Greek and Roman myths or even an in-depth look at the pantheon, but a marvelous female-centric take at the ancient Greek and Roman goddesses, looking particularly at those females who are strong enough to rival their male...
Gazelle is a fascinating glimpse of the expatriate world in Cairo in the 1950s. Lizzie, a thirteen year-old American girl, her mother, and her father (an expert on war) have moved there because of the father’s Fulbright scholarship. The mother, a blonde Scandinavian,...
A Quantum Love Story is a quantum physics meeting Fifty First Dates sort of romance; though it doesn’t meet the Romance Writers of America definition of a romance, it is a slow-burn romance that fizzles out before true completion. When a San Francisco particle...
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is a novella that retells the Norse myths, covering the history of the world from creation to destruction, through the eyes of a woman looking back at her childhood during World War II. She and her mother have evacuated from London to the...
Dinosaur Summer is a coming-of-age story set in an alternate past after the two world wars. On a plateau in South America, dinosaurs still exist. In the 1920s, the creatures were captured and used in circuses. The top circus at the time was the Lothar Gluck Circus...
Give me a book about art and artists, and I’m a happy reader. I find Blue Ruin particularly interesting because it raises many questions about what art is, what it’s like to produce it, and how much of an artist’s life is performance. I'm still pondering it several...
Linda Moore has given readers another art heist thriller. As in her debut novel, Attribution, the art world becomes a dangerous place despite the supposed calm of museums and art galleries. Five Days in Bogotá is a pulsating thriller within the world of art, yet the...
Say My Name is an interesting blend of true crime fiction and somewhat autobiographical fiction. Clifford writes of an author who, post-divorce, has returned to his childhood home to teach a summer session at a local university. When the job falls through and two...
Normally, I avoid books by celebrities as I feel they have enough celebrity and media promotion without my adding to their aura. However, as the mother of a Black child who enjoys fantasy and science fiction, I read this anyway. I would rate this at 3.5 but rounded to...
With a teenager in the house for the first time in years, I am catching up on some young adult reading so we can talk about the books over the dinner table. Rick Riordan has been a long-term favorite in this household, so we were glad to discover a new-to-us book,...
Juris Ex Machina is a genre-bending science fiction thriller set in the distant future. The city of Arcadia exists under a dome, and all its functions are controlled by artificial intelligence. Computers have taken over so entirely that they are the “jury” that...
Virtuous Women is a complex novel of faith in a changing world. Hope Wagner is being raised in a fundamentally religious family. Her mother dies giving birth to her eleventh child, but the father refuses to seek medical attention, feeling both that physicians are...
I’ll be upfront and say I’m a long-time fan of Michael Crichton and the Jurassic Park series of books and movies. If you enjoy that sort of sci-fi/thriller, Extinction is the book for you. I read it in its entirety in one night. I simply couldn’t put it down. Erebus...
Having read most of Rick Riordan’s young adult series, I decided to switch to his adult mystery series which I started eons ago and enjoyed but somehow never finished. The Tres Navarre series includes seven books, Big Red Tequila, The Widower’s Two Step, The Last King...
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