Author Rachel Howard writes of a couple’s struggle to adopt a foster child. It comes as no surprise that the child the narrator and her husband Sebastian choose to foster is a troubled child, Marisa. Having worked with such damaged children, I fully understand the...
Having recently finished Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then, I undertook another sci-fi novel—and was blown away by Light from Other Stars. Wow!!!—exquisite prose in an ambitious novel told in two timelines, the present (with the protagonist, Nedda Pappas, on a space...
Julie Clark's The Ones We Choose was released by Gallery Books on May 8, 2019. As a family practice doctor and the mother of an adopted son, I loved this book. The scientific aspects of DNA and genetics appealed to me as did the fact that the protagonist, Paige,...
Sometimes, the hardest thing to change is yourself. Eva Hagberg Fisher has written a gut-wrenching memoir about being being unloved and unloveable. This isn't a typical love story—though Eva falls in love with Winston Fisher, her husband—but is a story about the love...
Juno Rushdan’s debut novel, Every Last Breath, is intense. Suspense, action, and explicit sex scenes are roughly equally dispersed through the book. What is missing are the quiet sequels after the action to allow the reader to recuperate. Protagonist Maddox moves in...
To celebrate Earth Day, I am sneaking in a book review on Monday rather than Thursday. The release of Julia Goldstein's Material Value: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products is being timed with Earth Day, so...
Pickle's Progress is the debut novel of Marcia Butler, retired world-famous oboist. The title drew me in as I could only think of one other novel with “Pickle” in the title, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The latter is an 18th century satire in which a young,...
The Lost History of Dreams is an accomplished debut novel which reminded me of classics such as Wuthering Heights and the more contemporary Possession by A.S. Byatt. Set in Victorian England, the book, rich with Gothic creepiness, layers several love stories into a...
In her debut novel, Isabella Hammad uses richly-textured prose to invoke the turbulence of the Middle East right after World War I. I recently read Kurt Seyt and Shura by Nermin Bezmen and The Carpet Weaver of Usak by Kathryn Gauci, both of which deal roughly with the...
Set shortly after the Soviet Union imploded, this international intrigue takes FBI agent Jay Porter into Poland. There he’s quickly involved in a case where three men have been found dead on a riverbank. All have a minor genetic deformity: a stub of a sixth finger....
Because I'd read Sara Ackerman’s debut novel, Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers, I continued with her second novel. Told in the dual, third-person perspectives of Eva Cassidy and Lieutenant Clark Spencer interspersed with real memos, headlines, and military...
In the City by the Lake, Viktor, a half-Jewish Russian emigre, lives a life of quiet desperation as a low-grade mobster in Chicago from 1929 to 1938. Raised in an all-male family (his mother died birthing him), his Weltanschauung is skewed. He’s a tortured character...
I had to read The Chef's Secret because I’ve lived extensively in Italy. I've also read Crystal King’s The Feast of Sorrow and enjoyed her approach to food. Her newest historical novel did not let me down. The descriptions of food were enough to make me...
I was intrigued enough by the title, The Psychology of Time Travel, to pick up Kate Mascaenhas's new book. This is a genre-breaking book combining time travel, science fiction, a “locked room” mystery, with touches of romance. I am sure there are techies out there who...
I started this book and decided I really wasn’t interested in reading a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood at that particular moment, preferring something lighter and fluffier. But I decided to read a few pages, and the next thing I knew I’d finished the...
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