Art history graduate student Cate Adamson struggles to place herself in the male-dominated world of art history. Her doctoral advisor, the misogynistic Professor Herat Jones, has not only turned down every dissertation topic she’s broached, but has given her scut work...
Set in the late 1990s, Many Are Invited starts as a sort of buddy story. The two male leads, Steve and John, both in their mid thirties, work for the phone company trying to resolve the Y2K problem of what will happen to the world’s computer systems when 12/31/1999...
I have been on a bit of a horror binge (and I rarely read horror) starting with Kris Waldheer’s retelling of Frankenstein, Unnatural Creatures, told from the points of view of three women in Victor Frankenstein's life; followed by Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein;...
It’s been years since I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an amazingly masculine novel though authored by a very young female. You might get a bit more out of Unnatural Causes if you’ve read Frankenstein recently, but the book stands well on its own. Unnatural...
Julia Phillips’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, is structured somewhat akin to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Phillips writes multiple story lines each with its own narrator, and the full account plays out over the course of a year. It opens with...
Author Jeannée Sacken draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten reality in Double Exposure, the sequel to Behind the Lens. Annie Hawkins Green is a veteran photojournalist embedded during wars around the world. She’s dropped her married...
Landslide is author Sikes’s debut novel and the start of a series involving U.S. Marine veteran Mason Hackett. After being deployed in Iraq and losing his best friend in a disastrous military maneuver, he moves to London, goes to business school, and tries to start...
Set in East Texas in the second decade of the 1900s, this novel depicts the events of the era (racial discrimination, discrimination against Catholics and foreigners, the 1918 and 1919 flu pandemics, poverty, the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacy, and social upheaval) as...
In Blue Desert, Alice George, a headstrong young woman of sixteen, is trapped by the societal constraints of Edwardian England and a family that doesn't understand her. In 1910 her father moves the family to Morocco, and her life finally changes. On a drive with her...
Spirit Daughters continues author Carole Potenza’s Nicky Matthews Mystery series. I’ve read every Tony Hillerman mystery and, having been raised in the Southwest, love how he (and later his daughter Anne Hillerman) captured so beautifully the aura of the land and its...
Sign of the Eight is a teen/young adult epic fantasy. I felt at times it was closer to horror than fantasy with vampirelike creatures from the past, Tristan Nightsworn and Martha von Falkenstein, arising from a lake and feeding on humans. He is the messenger of doom;...
I read The Half-Drowned King because I embarked on a spree of reading Viking/Norse related books. Some time ago, I read all thirteen of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series, and more recently, I've read The Real Valkyrie by Nancy Marie Brown, The...
Where Wild Peaches Grow is set in Natchez, Mississippi, and depicts the dissolution and resolution of the Davenport family, primarily through the eyes of Nona. Thinking she has been betrayed by her family, she leaves them and heads to Chicago. There, she becomes a...
West with Giraffes has been on my to-be-read pile since it came out, and I regret taking so long to get to it. For some reason, the title made me think of Beryl Markham’s marvelous memoir, West with the Night, so I was expecting something along the lines of a safari...
The Silence in the Sound is a dual timeline novel, switching back and forth from the story past to the story present. It vividly portrays the effects of addiction on families. George (short for Georgette) has an alcoholic father and a mother who enables his behavior....
My Secret to Keep is the second novel by Barbara Conrey, who writes lovely women’s fiction. The book spans decades in the life of Maggie Bryan. She expects to follow the route of virtually every woman in her old-fashioned hometown: finish high school, marry, perhaps...
A Venom Dark and Sweet is the second book in Judy Lin’s duology, The Book of Tea. It stands alone, but to get the full sense of the world building, you should read them in consecutive order. Lin develops a truly original system of magic and carries it through both...
Sixth grader Ina definitely doesn’t fit in with her fellow sixth graders: she lives in the worst possible apartments in her school district; her mother is suffering from depression and has lost her job; the family is having financial difficulties; Ina’s got some...
Wild is the Witch is set in the Pacific Northwest, the perfect place for an atmospheric young adult novel about witchery and its connection with the Earth. It is a genre-blending confection that pulls off a young adult enemies-to-lovers trope well. Both the...
Author Jeannée Sacken draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten the reality she creates in Behind the Lens. Annie Hawkins Green is a veteran photojournalist who's been embedded during wars around the world. While in Afghanistan, she and...
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