Babylonia is set in ancient Assyria with its brutal, warlike society. The heroine, Semiramis, is orphaned when her mother commits suicide in the village of Mari in western Assyria. She’s adopted by the chief shepherd, a violent and sadistic man who frequently beats...
Canadian author Liam Taliesin scores with his debut novel, Lithium Fire. In it, he develops a vision of Winnipeg, Canada in the year 1984. The Royal Albert Arms Hotel is the central setting in a seedy neighborhood in Winnipeg, a “dive now but had a reasonably...
Having read Julia Phillips’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, with its lush descriptions of a place no one has heard of before (a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka, where one goes for “bears and volcanoes”), I wanted to read her newest. Bear is set on the...
The Medicine Woman of Galveston is the story of a female physician, Tucia Hatherley, at the turn of the 20th century. After her mother dies when she is twelve and her father remarries, she develops severe anxiety and copes with it with trichtillomania—pulling out her...
In Every Life is a novel about Ben and Harper, a couple who are on their honeymoon when he becomes quite ill, and he is eventually diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. As his way of coping with his illness, he devises a plan in which he hopes to have her find...
Thrust is a fascinating post-apocalyptic novel, loosely built around the Statue of Liberty, told from many points of view in many individual stories. First is Laisvė, a girl from Siberia who has immigrated with her father to America. She is a “carrier” who can move...
Ambushed is the third in Carol Potenza’s De-Exinct Zoo Mystery Series. Veterinarian Milly Smith trained in Siberia and now works in Pleistocene BioPark, a zoo dedicated by resurrected extinct megafauna (giant short-faced bears, dire wolves, smilodons, mammoths, woolly...
Jodi Picoult's By Any Other Name takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the title leads the reader straight into a dual timeline novel split between the present and the sixteenth century, with interspersed snippets from the script of a...
First seen as a child and teenager in Hild, Hilda of Whitby grows up to become one of the most powerful women in early English history—and the future Saint Hilda. The second book in the series, titled Menewood, is about Hild's adult life and continues her growth as a...
Hild of Whitby, seen as a child and teenager in Hild, grows up to become one of the most powerful women in early English history—and the future Saint Hilda. She enters a world transitioning from paganism to Christianity, situated between King Arthur during the late...
When the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century came out, I was appalled that I had only read ten of them, though I have that many more on my Kindle to-be-read stack. On Beauty is a funny, poignant family saga told in multiple points of...
Several years ago, I caught the Turkish TV series, Kurt Syet and Shura, which is based on the trilogy by Nermin Bezmen which, in turn, is based on her family history (she is a granddaughter of the eponymous Kurt Syet). Since watching it, I have been wanting to read...
If you enjoyed The Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Black Tulip, A Light of her Own, The Company Daughters, or The Signature of All Things, you'll enjoy Tulip Fever. Set in Amsterdam of the 1630s at the height of “tulip fever” where crazed traders and growers...
Give me a feminist retelling of almost any story, and I am quite happy. I particularly enjoy the revisionist accounts of the Greek and Roman myths that have come out recently. This book has been on my to-read list for several years. I regret not reading it sooner. The...
Releasing the Reins is Catherine Matthews’ debut novel, and she successfully pulls off a genre-breaking melange of coming of age, women’s fiction, mystery, and modern western, set against the vast expanse of Alaska. Matthews successfully blends the points of view of...
Recently I reread Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night” which was written in 1947 for his dying father. Somehow, it touched me much more than when I read it in college, perhaps because I am considerably older. After reading a fair amount of...
Lisa Barr’s Woman on Fire is not to be mistaken for the recent movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lovely historical period piece on film. While they both deal with artists, Woman on Fire is a contemporary art heist novel set in Chicago, Berlin, Montana, Miami, and...
Fugitive Colors explores the rape of Europe’s artistic patrimony before and during World War II, but it does so at a more personal level than most books I’ve read on the subject (Monuments Men, etc). Jakov Klein, a young Orthodox Jew, is born to be a painter. After a...
Having recently read an advanced readers' copy of Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name (due out August 20, 2024), I was interested enough to start picking up some of her back list, this time Small Great Things. This book in particular attracted me for two reasons: I am a...
In Light of the Fire, Beth and Ally, the only girls on their high school soccer team, fight back against their male soccer team’s misogynistic “pranks”; i.e., they lock the girls in the janitor’s closet so they won’t be able to out-perform the boys before soccer...
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