This book is one of the most intriguing I have ever read. Having spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am always interested in learning more of the cultures there, and The Underground Girls delves into a phenomenon I never knew existed. Sons are prized in...
In The Last Road Trip, Mary Blake Bulloch convinces four of her sorority sisters to redo their college trip which was cut short by a disaster twenty years earlier. Each woman is dealing with her own crisis of some sort—divorce, terminal illness, death of a beloved...
In the Great Quiet opens with the Oklahoma land rush of 1893. An independent young woman, Minnie Hoopes, plans to stake a claim, hoping for land to call her own. When her claim is challenged by two outlaws, Minnie soon has their blood on her hands. She choses to...
When the local lumber company wants to harvest trees from the protected two-hundred-acre expanse of ancient great white pines near the town of Aurora, Minnesota, an environmental extremist, the Eco-Warrior, responds by setting explosives to bring down the mill and...
In the second novel in the Cork O'Connor series, Boundary Waters, Shiloh, a young woman, retreats to the wilds for a period of self-discovery. Her father, Willie Raye, arrives in Aurora looking for her concerned about her safety with the approaching winter. Ex-sheriff...
I really enjoyed reading William Kent Krueger's stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace and have always intended to read his Cork O’Connor books and have been collecting them to read in order. Some time ago, I started with #18 in the series as it serves as the prequel for...
Not being overly fond of gothic novels, I rarely read them. Somehow, though, I ended up reading two in close proximity. The first, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is a gem studded with literary references and chock-full of twists and turns and a strong...
The Thirteenth Tale is a gothic mystery packed with family secrets and twists that keep the reader guessing. The elderly Vida Winter, the world’s most famous living author, asks an unknown young author, Margaret Lea, to write her biography. Notorious for feeding the...
A Stopover in Venice, per its blurb, should have had everything I enjoy in a novel: a woman rediscovering herself as her marriage winds down; a sojourn in Venice, one of my favorite cities; and art and art history. It ended up being a mixed bag. It was a difficult...
The Seed Keeper is a multi-generational saga told from the points of view of four different women. The primary story is that of Rosalie Iron Wing, who is orphaned young and sent to foster care. There, she meets Gaby Makespeace, forming a friendship that lasts decades....
I enjoyed reading the first in Carol Potenza’s mystery series, String of Lies, and found I liked the second, Echo of Lies, just as much. Potenza writes of strong female protagonists who don’t need to be rescued—my kind of women. The newest protagonist, Francie Cortez,...
Minor Black Figures is an interesting blend of politics, art, and LGBTQI issues. Wyeth, a young Black artist, was raised by a distant White mother and absent Black father. He worries constantly about how people perceive him and his art. He’s having trouble painting...
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...
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