During the Napoleonic era in Europe, flowers and their “secret meanings” became a bona fide craze; for example, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, a painter and botanist from the Austrian Netherlands, was renowned for his watercolors of roses, lilies, and other flowers, many of...
Laurus describes the life of a fictional fifteenth-century ascetic Russian folk healer, pilgrim, and monk. Arseny, the protagonist, after his parents die of the plague, is raised by his grandfather, a skilled healer who teaches his grandson both healing and reading...
The Weight of Ink is a three point-of-view (Helen Watt, a British professor with Parkinson’s disease; her graduate student, Aaron Levy; and Ester Velasquez, a Jewish immigrant who serves as a scribe to a blind rabbi who lost his vision in the Inquisition. This is also...
After reading Russell’s The Antidote recently and being enchanted with it, I decided to read some of her older works, beginning with Swamplandia!, her debut novel. Swamplandia! is a family-run tourist attraction on an island in the Everglades. The cast of characters...
River of Lies is the second in author James L’Etoile’s Detective Emily Hunter Mystery series. Though it continues with the same characters both major and minor, it can easily be read as a standalone. I’ve read and enjoyed L’Etoile’s earlier Nathan Parker and Detective...
Kills Well with Others is the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age. A quartet of “women of a certain age,” retired assassins Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called out of retirement (they’re still waiting on their pensions) by the organization they work for,...
My Name is Emilia del Valle has everything I typically look for in fiction, especially women's fiction and historical fiction: an indomitable female protagonist facing sexism, unjust social mores, and other obstacles in her life. Somehow, this novel fails to deliver...
Each year I look forward to the next installment of the Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito Navajo mysteries by the father-daughter duo of Tony and Anne Hillerman. Shadow of the Solstice is the 28th novel in the series. They are consistently good reads, and I have read...
The Language of the Birds is a Da Vinci Code-type of young-adult exploit filled with complicated ciphers, codes, puzzles, American history, and conspiracy theories involving Herbert Hoover, the US President who botched the American recovery from the Great Depression....
I was immersed in Roll the Sun Across the Sky from the first line: “The summer before I ruin his life …” Of course, I had to learn how the protagonist, a twenty-four-year-old woman, destroys someone’s life! That the story involves a trip across Europe during the...
The Last Maasai Warrior is a fascinating historical fiction account of British colonization of Kenya which has many parallels to the invasion of North America by Europeans and the ensuing genocide of Native Americans. The British, in 1904, yield the Maasai control of...
I absolutely adore Toni Morrison’s works and have read most of her oeuvre but somehow missed her sole short story, "Recitatif." This edition has a lovely forty-page introduction by Zadie Smith who analyzes and helps readers grasp the story. At its heart, “Recitatif”...
Rainwater is set in Texas during the Great Depression, though judging from the fact that the families there have gardens that actually produce, they are not in the worst areas of the Dust Bowl. Ella Baron runs a boarding house in what was her family’s home. Abandoned...
In The King’s Messenger, Kearsley takes as her inspiration the untimely death of Henry, the heir to the throne of King James (the son of Mary Queen of Scotts) and Queen Anna. The book takes place in 1613 when young Andrew Logan, a Messenger for the King, is sent to...
The Sirens is a two timeline story. One is set in 1800 with two sisters, Eliza and Mary, banished to Australia from England and carried there on the Naiad, a ship that sinks off the Australian shore with the loss of one hundred lives. The other timeline is...
Having just finished penning my own novel about the Dust Bowl, I picked up The Antidote, not knowing it was a book about the Dust Bowl. From the first few words, I developed a severe case of writers-envy—The Antidote is simply extraordinary, and I wish I’d written it....
I LOVE THIS BOOK. It is wildly expensive but worth every penny for its 757 pages. It is nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. Believe it or not, there are truly some laugh-out-loud moments. Having lived in Italy, I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Florence,...
Weyward is a lovely three point-of-view debut novel about three women who exist four centuries apart (Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019). Their timelines and lives are intertwined and connected by their common family history, their struggle with evil in...
Afraid to Let Grow is the second in the Marriage Survivors Club series, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without having read the prequel (In the Beginning) or the first in the series (Do Over Daughter). The series involves the intertwined stories of a...
The Whip is a fictionalized biography of a famous Wells Fargo stagecoach driver in California. Charlotte Parkhurst (1812-1879) is dropped at an orphanage as an infant. She soon bonds with a boy named Lee Colton who assumes the role of her protector and best friend,...
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