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...
This is a World War II story about a young girl, Magda, who lives on a farm with her parents and brothers in Czechoslovakia. Born with a large birthmark on her cheek, she’s been teased mercilessly her entire life, eroding her self confidence. During World War II, a...
I was fortunate to have read an early version of Olympus, Texas and have eagerly anticipated its final version since. Author Stacey Swann populates her novel with characters loosely based on Greek gods but with a Texas twang. Olympus, Texas is an insightful look at...
Arsenic and Adobo is the first in the Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery Series. It is a cute cozy mystery with an ever-increasing body count. It stars Lila Macapagal who leaves the big city to return home to Shady Palms to help out at her failing family restaurant. The...
I must admit I read this in one sitting, pulled along by the mysteries that were slowly unveiled. This is a modern gothic novel—which doesn’t read like a debut novel—with elements of the The Stepford Wives, a satirical thriller written in the early 1970s by Ira Levin...
Letters Across the Sea is an account of Canadian history from the Great Depression until shortly after the end of World War II. Molly Ryan, a lass with an Irish background, has loved Max Dreyfus, a Jewish boy, since childhood. During the 1933 Christie Pits Riot in...
In The Angle of Flickering Light, Gina Troisi’s lawyer father is a serial philanderer. Rather than being secretive about his affairs, he tells his two children, five-year-old Gina and her sister, about these indiscretions before he abandons them to marry his...
Daytime Drama is Sarahlyn Bruck’s second novel. In it, Callipe Hart, who’s been an actress since her teens, sees her world crumble when the network cancels her long-running daytime soap opera. She wonders if she’s too old to continue in television, but—with no other...
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