Book Reviews
BOOK REVIEW: Guide Me Home (Highway 59 #3) by Attica Locke

BOOK REVIEW: Guide Me Home (Highway 59 #3) by Attica Locke

Guide Me, Home, the third installment of Attica Locke’s Southern noir Highway 59 mystery series continues along the veins of the first two. Darren Matthews, a Black Texas ranger, is persistently drinking, is burnt out, and resigns his commission. He divorces his wife...

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BOOK REVIEW: Doctors and Friends by Kimmery Martin

BOOK REVIEW: Doctors and Friends by Kimmery Martin

Doctors and Friends centers around a group of female physicians who’ve been buddies since medical school. Kira is an infectious disease doctor; Compton, an ER doc; Hannah, an OB-GYN; Georgia, a urologist; and Vani, an internist. These five go on vacation in Spain and...

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BOOK REVIEW: Hot Hex Boyfriend by Carly Bloom

BOOK REVIEW: Hot Hex Boyfriend by Carly Bloom

Hot Hex Boyfriend is a cute enemies-to-lovers paranormal romance. Delia Merriweather is approaching her thirtieth birthday and still living with her eccentric but adorable extended family in Willow Root, Texas. She’s tried multiple careers, but nothing has ever taken...

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BOOK REVIEW: Babylonia by Costanza Casati

BOOK REVIEW: Babylonia by Costanza Casati

Babylonia is set in ancient Assyria with its brutal, warlike society. The heroine, Semiramis, is orphaned when her mother commits suicide in the village of Mari in western Assyria. She’s adopted by the chief shepherd, a violent and sadistic man who frequently beats...

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BOOK REVIEW: Lithium Fire by Liam Taliesin

BOOK REVIEW: Lithium Fire by Liam Taliesin

Canadian author Liam Taliesin scores with his debut novel, Lithium Fire. In it, he develops a vision of Winnipeg, Canada in the year 1984. The Royal Albert Arms Hotel is the central setting in a seedy neighborhood in Winnipeg, a “dive now but had a reasonably...

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BOOK REVIEW: Bear by Julia Phillips

BOOK REVIEW: Bear by Julia Phillips

Having read Julia Phillips’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, with its lush descriptions of a place no one has heard of before (a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka, where one goes for “bears and volcanoes”), I wanted to read her newest. Bear is set on the...

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BOOK REVIEW: In Every Life by Rea Frey

BOOK REVIEW: In Every Life by Rea Frey

In Every Life is a novel about Ben and Harper, a couple who are on their honeymoon when he becomes quite ill, and he is eventually diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. As his way of coping with his illness, he devises a plan in which he hopes to have her find...

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BOOK REVIEW: Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

BOOK REVIEW: Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

Thrust is a fascinating post-apocalyptic novel, loosely built around the Statue of Liberty, told from many points of view in many individual stories. First is Laisvė, a girl from Siberia who has immigrated with her father to America. She is a “carrier” who can move...

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BOOK REVIEW: Ambushed by Carol Potenza

BOOK REVIEW: Ambushed by Carol Potenza

Ambushed is the third in Carol Potenza’s De-Exinct Zoo Mystery Series. Veterinarian Milly Smith trained in Siberia and now works in Pleistocene BioPark, a zoo dedicated by resurrected extinct megafauna (giant short-faced bears, dire wolves, smilodons, mammoths, woolly...

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BOOK REVIEW: By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

BOOK REVIEW: By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult's By Any Other Name takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the title leads the reader straight into a dual timeline novel split between the present and the sixteenth century, with interspersed snippets from the script of a...

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BOOK REVIEW: Menewood by Nicola Griffith

BOOK REVIEW: Menewood by Nicola Griffith

First seen as a child and teenager in Hild, Hilda of Whitby grows up to become one of the most powerful women in early English history—and the future Saint Hilda. The second book in the series, titled Menewood, is about Hild's adult life  and continues her growth as a...

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BOOK REVIEW: Hild by Nicola Griffith

BOOK REVIEW: Hild by Nicola Griffith

Hild of Whitby, seen as a child and teenager in Hild, grows up to become one of the most powerful women in early English history—and the future Saint Hilda. She enters a world transitioning from paganism to Christianity, situated between King Arthur during the late...

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BOOK REVIEW: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

BOOK REVIEW: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

When the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century came out, I was appalled that I had only read ten of them, though I have that many more on my Kindle to-be-read stack. On Beauty is a funny, poignant family saga told in multiple points of...

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