After her husband’s death, the protagonist of Brenda Barker's Next Chapter, Brenda decides to write the book her spouse, Maynard, always disparaged. She married him, a rodeo cowboy turned construction worker, because he offered stability. Now, he’s dead, their only...
I enjoy reading about art and artists (especially women artists and their struggles for recognition in the male-oriented art world), so I was particularly drawn to this book. The Woman Who Painted the Seasons is the fictional biography of Lena Krassner (who renames...
Knowing that Susan Bernhard has a new book (Westerly) coming out on June 1, 2026, I decided to reread her marvelous debut novel, Winter Loon, before reading the new one. In Winter Loon, Wes Ballott watches his mother die in a frozen lake in Minnesota. After that...
As a physician, I enjoy reading books dealing with medical issues and/or medical ethics, especially if the author gets the "medical stuff" right without too many glaring errors. In Midwives, author Bohjalian does just that. He takes an experienced midwife,...
In Illusion of Truth, the third in the Detective Emily Hunter mystery series, author James L'Etoile continues the story of Emily Hunter as she solves a crime spree that affects her—and someone she loves—directly. One of the things I like best about this series...
The Nickel Boys, a multi-award winning novel (Pulitzer Prize, Kirkus Prize, National Book Award Nominee, etc etc etc), deserves every accolade. It is based on events that occurred in a reform school in Tennessee that for 111 years abused and neglected boys sentenced...
Tom Clavin brings to life another episode in the American Wild West during the late nineteenth century, this time focusing on the Daltons. The Last Outlaws deals with the Dalton gang (later becoming the Doolin-Dalton gang) that cut a reign of terror from Kansas and...
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras is semi-autobiographical fiction in the vein of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is a masterful debut novel set in Columbia during the time it was controlled by 128 paramilitary groups, including Pablo...
I read the first two in Daniel Hecht’s Cree Black series, City of Masks and Land of Echoes, which are genre-bending mixes of mystery, paranormal, horror, and ghost stories. Cree Black is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist who works for a company that investigates...
Jodi Picoult brilliantly blends multiple points of view in Handle with Care, a well-researched novel about a child born with osteogenesis imperfect (brittle bone disease). Picoult also tackles multiple difficult topics (wrongful birth, medical malpractice, our...
Hello Wife has a lot in common with Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver as both deal with the problem of drug addiction in contemporary America, though I preferred the Kingsolver version. Charlotte Lansing, the protagonist of Hello Wife, is a fifty-something woman...
The Pasha of Cuisine reminds me of another Turkish book I read recently, The Architect’s Apprentice by El if Shafak. Both are set in the Ottoman Empire, are based in a tradition of oral storytelling, and have a dash of magical realism. When the old sultan dies, his...
I’m continuing my quest to read the entirety of Larry McMurtry’s works. In The Last Kind Words Saloon, McMurtry returns to the late nineteenth century American West of Lonesome Dove. This is a sequel of sorts to Telegraph Days but with a different cast of characters...
This is a review of all 1424 pages of the multi-award winning Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, I don’t read much science fiction these days but grew up reading now-classic sci-fi from notables like Asimov, Le Guin, Heinlein, and Clarke. The Broken Earth series...
I loved Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Tom Lake, so I can't figure out why it took me so long to get around to reading The Magician's Assistant. Guy Fetters is an abused teenager from Nebraska who leaves home. After erasing his past, he becomes a successful magician,...
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