House of Odysseus is an interesting retelling of the Odyssey, but centered on Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who he left behind when he went to fight the Trojan War. This is the second in author Claire North’s Penelopiad. Nearly twenty years after the fall of Troy,...
The Other Princess opens with a girl’s birth and with her mother naming her Aina (difficult) due to the difficulty with her birth. Aina is the daughter of a local king inYoruba. Their village is attacked, and she is torn from her family, most of whom were slaughtered....
I enjoyed reading Carol Potenza’s newest mystery, Sting of Lies, the first in the Lies series. Potenza writes strong female protagonists who don’t need to be rescued—my kind of women. Myrna (pronounced as in meerkat) P. Lee is smart, hard-headed, and has plenty of...
In the Time of Our History is a thought-provoking book that delves into family ties, alliances within families, subjugation and independence. Mitra Jahani is an Iranian-American woman who has moved to San Francisco after being disowned by her father. A year earlier,...
In Those People Behind Us, author Mary Camarillo writes of Wellington Beach, California, a beachside community caught in the crossfire between liberals and Trumpsters during the summer of 2017, but the story could be set in any American town. She builds multiple...
Fencing with the King is a fascinating story of Amani, a young Jordanian-American poet exploring her Jordanian roots. She has found a poem that appears to have been written by her paternal grandmother in one of her father’s old books. On the occasion of King Hussein’s...
In The Rule of Thirds, the third (and, alas, the final) book in the Annie Hawkins series, author Jeannée Sacken again draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten the reality she creates. Annie is a veteran photojournalist who's been...
Beneath the Lion’s Wings is set between Venice and Los Angeles. The novel does an admirable job of capturing the essence of Venice. The female protagonist, Victoria, is a thirty-something woman who works as an executive assistant in a talent agency, who visits the...
Though Loki’s Deceit is the second in the Charlemagne Cross Series series, I was able to get the gist of things without any problems having done a good bit of reading in Norse myths and historical fiction. The book relates European history just after the time of...
Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope #1) is an interesting retelling of The Odyssey, centered on Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who he left behind when he went off to fight the Trojan War. Eighteen years later, she is still alone. Her son Telemachus is growing up, but her...
There’s a lot to like about This Terrible Beauty. It is historical fiction at its finest, filled with injustice, sacrifice, and redemption. I was drawn to it, as a former photographer, because Bettina Heilstrom, the female protagonist, is a photojournalist, and I was...
The Resurrectionist is a gritty, ominous, atmospheric, bleak gothic novel filled with multiple unreliable narrators and dislikable if not despicable characters. Set in London in the early nineteenth century, it shows the life of people surviving in London’s worst...
Dream Wheels is my second novel by Richard Wagamese (the first being Indian Horse), and I’ve now put all this other works on my to-be-read pile. In both novels, I was impressed by his prose and his storytelling. I sat up most of the night reading it and had to fight...
Cities of Women is a multiple point of view novel that shifts between Verity Frazier, a modern academic, Bèatrice, a medieval French artist, and Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian writer for the court of Charles VI, during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth...
Don’t Forget to Write is a witty, funny, wry, poignant coming-of-age story with marvelous characters and a bittersweet ending. When the protagonist, Marilyn Kleinman, is caught making out with the rabbi’s son in a conservative synagogue in New York City—then refuses...
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