This is a YA fantasy story loosely based on Norse Mythology. The story combines fantasy with a young adult love story in the classic hero’s quest. The protagonist is Hirka, a fifteen-year-old girl who is different from everyone else she knows. She was born without a...
The Bachelor Bargain marks the beginning of a new series of romances by Maddison Michaels. This is the 1890s version of a romantic suspense, set in England where the social mores of the mid-Victorian era were conflicting with the burgeoning of women’s rights and labor...
It was interesting reading Whiskey When We’re Dry in relatively close proximity to Outlawed by Anna North. Outlawed is an amazing speculative Western that really shakes up the Western genre by tackling the patriarchy, gender roles/identity, race, religion, fertility,...
I was sucked into this macabre book from the first page. It’s like The Addams Family meets true crime television. It contains all the elements to draw a reader in. A mother’s obsessive grief leads her to actions that scar her family forever, leaving them dysfunctional...
Set in New Mexico in 1952, Kari Bovée’s Bones of the Redeemed is an excellent historical mystery. Bovée won the 2019 Hillerman Southwest Fiction Award. She writes strong female heroines and writes them well, but Ruby Delgado must be her best yet. Ruby thinks quickly...
Where the Truth Lies is a dark, claustrophobic vision of a small American logging town in Colorado which is caught in a multi-layered web of lies. The novel defines depression and bleakness while dealing with the worst of America: spousal abuse, controlling spouses,...
The classic myths we read in high school tell us of conquests of men and the glory they achieved from this events. A Thousand Ships focuses on the women in a unique perspective, told by Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry as she answers the pleas of a poet for...
Prospects of a Woman looks at women’s rights and status during the Gold Rush. California was at the forefront of women’s rights, allowing women to own property, divorce, etc. unlike most of the United States. In 1850, Elizabeth and Nate travel from an apple orchard in...
We Were Never Here caught my attention from the first page. Emily, a nearly-thirty woman, has takes annual trips to some exotic locale with her friend of ten years, Kristen. In Quiteria, Chile, Emily has a momentary vision of pushing Kristen off an elevated wooden...
Incense and Sensibility is a rather loose retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It is the third in the Rajes series but works well as a stand-alone. The novel deals with Yash Raje, who’s been a character in the prior novels, but comes into his own here. He...
M.A. Guglielmo’s novels, Soul to Seal and Price to Pay, are light-hearted, fun reads which should appeal to older YA readers. The story begins in Summoned (#1 in the series) in which Daniel Goldstein, a Jewish gaming designer, is told by his grandmother’s ghost to...
Though I was hesitant to read a book about Apaches written by a white man, I must admit that Conrad’s The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival is a fascinating and erudite book. Through his research into archives in the United States, Spain,...
As a physician, I was sucked right into this book because of the medical accuracy (the author is a physician herself), the strong female protagonist, and the end-of-life issues. Anesthesiologist Dr. Kate Downey realizes that elderly patients are dying at home days...
As a writer, I’ve done some research on the American Gilded Age and the World's Columbian Exposition Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (the World’s Fair). Wisseman does an outstanding job blending exemplary research into a very dark alternate history fantasy, even...
A Lullaby in the Desert, though fiction, is a stark book that conveys the horror of real events occurring in certain parts of the Middle East. Azar goes a wonderful job setting the scene of bombed out skeletons of buildings, the tension of getting through life on a...
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