Salvation: A novel based on a true story is the story of two girls “kidnapped” by a female evangelist in 1971. It is based on events told to author Avery Caswell by one of the children involved. Her testimony is coupled with Ms. Caswell’s research. In 1971, the United...
I loved this debut novel. The first chapter drew me in to this wildly dysfunctional family. The main characters are Olga Acevedo (named after a radical female) and her brother Prieto. Their father dies of AIDS picked up through intravenous drug use. Their mother...
The Beautiful Ones is very unlike Ms. Moreno-Garcia’s noir-ish Velvet Was the Night. The Beautiful Ones is a comedy of manners set in an imaginary world in which the characters maintain the tightly-drawn roles of the late 19th century British gentry with the addition...
In Athena's Child, a retelling of the Greek myth of Medusa and Perseus, Hannah Lynn depicts a beautiful young Medusa serving in Athena’s temple. Poseidon forces himself upon her. Athena, rather than blame Poseidon for raping her acolyte, blames Medusa and curses her,...
The Maid is a murder mystery set in the Regency Grand, a luxury hotel, and is narrated by the protagonist, Molly Gray. Molly, AKA Molly the Maid, is a twenty-five year old woman on the autism spectrum with the additional trait of being obsessive-compulsive. Her...
Colson Whitehead, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, presents his newest effort, Harlem Shuffle, a genre-bending amalgamation of historical fiction, family drama, and noir-ish crime drama. It is a multi-layered look at New York City’s Harlem neighborhood during the 1950s...
In Persephone's Children: A Life in Fragments, Rowan McCandless uses a lovely, unique manner to create her memoir; she uses scaffolding of various types, including the alphabet that begins the book ("A is for ancestry…and also for ambiguity, anemia, and...
Orphans of the Tide, Struan Murray’s debut novel, is a great middle-grade read. I was drawn in immediately by the unique world-building. The novel is fast-paced, filled with action, and populated with delightful characters. The City, the only remaining city in the...
The End is a pre-apocalyptical dystopian science fiction young adult book that deftly handles a bevy of social issues. It blends sci-fi with thriller as teens solve a murder. It may be more suited for older teens as alcohol, sex, and drugs play a large role. The...
The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women is part history, part archeology, and part social criticism of the later re-interpretations of the Icelandic sagas. Brown admits that much of the book is speculation based on archeological finds throughout...
In Sandie Jones’s The Guilt Trip, three couples travel to Portugal for a destination wedding. Rachel and Jack are the sister-in-law and brother of the groom, Will, who is already on site. Their friends Noah and Paige accompany them on the same flight as does Ali, the...
My attention was captured within the first paragraph of this delightful, unique, somewhat weird book. It was captivating enough I could suspend disbelief through the entire novel. I loved it! Tiny, a human, has intercourse with a female owl and becomes pregnant with...
Initially I had mixed feelings about this book. In the beginning, I felt the author was trying too hard to be literary. I frequently had to look up words in the dictionary (not that this is a bad thing, but it took me out of the story to do so). The Archivist is a...
An enjoyable historical fiction novel. I was transported to Paris in the mid 1850s with the Carbonari (an Italian radical group to which Lord Byron belonged) plotting against the French Emperor, Napoleon III, in an effort to get him to back them in their attempts to...
Velvet Was the Night is more noir than thriller; it seems like an updated Raymond Chandler-esque book. The tone is persistently dark, even bleak, but the reader gets the sense that the point-of-view characters will come through. It is set during the 1970s, a decade in...
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