American Dirt has been mired in so much controversy, I almost didn't read it. In the end, though, curiosity pulled me in so I could make up my own mind. The #MeToo and the #OwnVoices movements have caused a fundamental shift in America and in American literature. As a...
If She had Stayed is Ms. Byington’s sophomore book and was such a joy to read I whizzed through it in one sitting. She successfully blends women’s fiction with time travel while fan-girling over scientist Nikola Tesla. Kaley Kline, a mid-thirties woman, having never...
Tracy Walder’s The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists is her memoir of her years as a counterterrorism officer in the CIA and a special agent in the FBI in the post-911 world. She makes it...
Per the author, Anne de Courcy, this book (Chanel's Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930-1944) isn't intended to be a definitive biography of Coco Chanel. It is more of a biography of a place—the French Riviera—before and during the Second...
I was captivated by Mark Guerin's You Can See More From Up Here from the first sentence. The relationships in reporter Walker McGuire’s life are gradually amped up in an engaging way as is the suspense. The reader has ample opportunity to bond with each character as...
This is author Elena Mikalsen’s third book, and with each her prose has tightened. Here, she draws upon her experience as a psychologist. Her protagonist, college student Emma, has been raped, beaten, and left for dead by a football player. She is forced from school...
The Disharmony of Silence, released March 5, 2020 by Black Rose Writing, authored by Linda Rosen shows how secrets affect families through future generations. She tells the dual stories of Lena and Carolyn through alternating time lines separated by eighty-plus years....
Lily King’s Writers & Lovers is an extraordinary novel. As a writer I appreciated King’s efforts at capturing the life of a writer; they seem genuine as she describes the difficulty of putting words on a page in a meaningful way. This is King’s fifth novel and...
Though The Sinful Scot is the third book in Maddison Michaels’s Saints and Scoundrels series, it can be read as a standalone novel. Connie is raised to marry a man chosen by her parents, one most likely to elevate the family status. Unfortunately, the duke they...
The Blood-Dimmed Tide is the second in Michael R. Johnston’s Remembrance War space opera series. It would have been helpful to have read the first (The Widening Gyre), but Johnston provides enough backstory during The Blood-Dimmed Tide that reading the first isn’t...
Echoed in My Bones deals with interracial adoption. I chose to read it as I adopted a biracial child years ago and am interested in the topic. I also read the National Geographic “Black and White” issue (April 2018) with a photograph of twins, one black and one white,...
Poison is a thriller set in primarily in the Emergency Room where Dr. Emma Steele works. People who visit the ER are returning as codes or dropping dead within a few days of their initial ER visit. But only her most vile patients are dying: the child abusers, wife...
Keena Roberts, in this delightful coming-of-age memoir, describes a life divided. Her parents, both primatologists, are on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and divide their time between field research and teaching. Where they go, they take their two...
As in his debut novel, Here and Now and Then, Mike Chen brings a refreshing new emotionalism to science fiction with his latest work, A Beginning at the End. This is a refreshing take on post-apocalyptic sci-fi. A flu pandemic devastates the world population—and takes...
Everything Here Is Beautiful is Mira T. Lee’s debut novel, and a very sophisticated one it is. In the back of her book, there’s an interview with her in which she describes how she didn’t want to write about mental illness per se, but about relationships and how they...
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