I started out not liking Optic Nerve, an “autofiction” book, feeling it read as the rather self-indulgent memoir of a neurotic woman. However, I soon changed my mind. The author, María Gainza, is an Argentine art critic, and her insights into herself and the paintings...
Rewrite the Stars is about a failing marriage—one that is complicated by the husband’s post-Afghanistan PTSD. Sadie and Theo are watching their true love and dream marriage dissolve, and they must decide whether to give up or dig in and retrench. Sadie, a working...
Truth and Other Lies is an impressive debut. Author Maggie Smith juggles two genres (coming-of-age and mystery), three nuanced female characters, and multiple difficult topics. The youngest of the three women, Megan Barnes, returns to Chicago after losing her job and...
Acts of the Women is grounded in one of the most known and most sacred stories in history, the death of Jesus Christ. Author Patrick Anderson significantly twists this story by telling it from the points of view of the women involved, many of whom are well known,...
Portrait of a Thief is told from the points of view of five Chinese-American college students. Will Chen, an art history student at Harvard, is approached by a Chinese super-corporation to steal five sculptures (fountain heads looted from the Old Summer Palace in...
Maggie Smith joins me today. She loves a challenge. In careers that have included work as a journalist, a psychologist, and the founder of a national art consulting company, she’s now added published author to her resume. Raised in Oklahoma but a resident of Wisconsin...
Ariadne looks at the many ways women are subject to men (and how both males and females subject to the whims of the gods). All women face one or more of these at the hands of men: domestic physical and emotional abuse, rape, infidelity, being treated as chattel,...
The Bucharest Dossier is a classic espionage thriller set in 1989 against the back drop of the Romanian Revolution and the fall of communism. The protagonist, Bill Heflin, is a double refugee. As a child, he moved from Romania to Greece then on to America, resulting...
Sarah J. Sover’s first book, Double-Crossing the Bridge, is a play on the fairy tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” If you ever wanted a story about the Underworld, filled with trolls and other monsters, Double-Crossing the Bridge is for you. Sover's second novel,...
I've been a long-time fan of Tony Hillerman since my father introduced me to those mysteries way back in the early 1970s. Since then, I've read every Tony Hillerman book and, being raised in the Southwest, love how he (and later his daughter, Anne Hillerman) capture...
Robin Hood—The Shadows of Sherwood Forest is an interesting twist on the typical Robin Hood story as it is told from the point of view of Little John. I recently read Röehrig’s Erik the Red and found his Robin Hood much more readable. Robin Hood is considerably...
Erik the Red is a fictional account of the life of the eponymous Erik Thorvaldsson, a medieval Norse explorer. Erik is portrayed as a hot-tempered young man and follows his life until his death. Other prominent characters include Erik’s wife as well as his best...
Out Front the Following Sea is a delight to read. It’s thoroughly researched but doesn’t get bogged down in historical facts. Set in 1689, during the King William’s War between French and English settlers, the novel abounds with adventure and romance as it deals with...
Stephanie Foo uses her journalism background to research and beautifully write her memoir of surviving long-term childhood abuse, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex. When her therapist reveals Ms. Foo's diagnosis of Complex PTSD, Ms. Foo begins years...
In The Collector’s Apprentice, the author B. A. Shapiro disguises the life of Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes, the chemist and physician, as Edwin Bradley, a man with a similar history, and turns it into a thriller. Both men develop a medication, Argyrol, to prevent...
Gods of Jade and Shadow is quite different from Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s noir-ish Velvet Was the Night. Gods of Jade and Shadow is set in the Yucatan peninsula during the 1920s. The old myths and religious beliefs of the indigenous folk have withered away, supplanted by...
Violeta is a coming of age story written in an epistolary style in a very long manuscript she sends to her grandson, Camilo. The protagonist, Violeta Del Valle, came into the world with the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1920, and, now 100, faces the Coronavirus...
S. M. Goodwin pulled me into Crooked in His Ways immediately just as she did the first book in the series, Absence of Mercy. As a physician I enjoyed her descriptions of Jasper Lightner, a Crimean War hero with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a traumatic brain...
The Island of Missing Trees is undoubtedly the most beautiful, most lyrical book I've read recently. I previously enjoyed Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul but feel she outdid herself with this newest book. Shafak writes with imagination, originality, and a hefty...
I read The Violin Conspiracy in one sitting, pulled along by the events and the emotional drama. The book follows Rayquan “Ray” McMillian, a vitruoso violinist from childhood through his entry into the world-famous Tchaikovsky musical competition in Moscow. Shortly...
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