In the first of the Grecian Women Trilogy books, Athena's Child, Hannah Lynn retells the story of Medusa and Perseus. In the second of the trilogy, A Spartan's Sorrow, Lynn revisits the Trojan War, focusing on Clytemnestra. As in her depiction of Medusa, Lynn again...
Salvation: A novel based on a true story is the story of two girls “kidnapped” by a female evangelist in 1971. It is based on events told to author Avery Caswell by one of the children involved. Her testimony is coupled with Ms. Caswell’s research. In 1971, the United...
I loved this debut novel. The first chapter drew me in to this wildly dysfunctional family. The main characters are Olga Acevedo (named after a radical female) and her brother Prieto. Their father dies of AIDS picked up through intravenous drug use. Their mother...
The Beautiful Ones is very unlike Ms. Moreno-Garcia’s noir-ish Velvet Was the Night. The Beautiful Ones is a comedy of manners set in an imaginary world in which the characters maintain the tightly-drawn roles of the late 19th century British gentry with the addition...
In Athena's Child, a retelling of the Greek myth of Medusa and Perseus, Hannah Lynn depicts a beautiful young Medusa serving in Athena’s temple. Poseidon forces himself upon her. Athena, rather than blame Poseidon for raping her acolyte, blames Medusa and curses her,...
The Maid is a murder mystery set in the Regency Grand, a luxury hotel, and is narrated by the protagonist, Molly Gray. Molly, AKA Molly the Maid, is a twenty-five year old woman on the autism spectrum with the additional trait of being obsessive-compulsive. Her...
Colson Whitehead, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, presents his newest effort, Harlem Shuffle, a genre-bending amalgamation of historical fiction, family drama, and noir-ish crime drama. It is a multi-layered look at New York City’s Harlem neighborhood during the 1950s...
In Persephone's Children: A Life in Fragments, Rowan McCandless uses a lovely, unique manner to create her memoir; she uses scaffolding of various types, including the alphabet that begins the book ("A is for ancestry…and also for ambiguity, anemia, and...
Today I chat with Sandra Hutchison, author of The Awful Mess: A Love Story. Born and raised in Florida, Sandra survived her parents' move to the small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts and eventually stopped sulking about it, though it's possible she's still working...
Orphans of the Tide, Struan Murray’s debut novel, is a great middle-grade read. I was drawn in immediately by the unique world-building. The novel is fast-paced, filled with action, and populated with delightful characters. The City, the only remaining city in the...
Andrea Stehle is a Latin teacher by day and a sci-fi mythology author by night. She spent most of her life/career in Texas but has recently moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to teach middle school Latin. Her Gods of Arcadia series was inspired by her love of classical...
The End is a pre-apocalyptical dystopian science fiction young adult book that deftly handles a bevy of social issues. It blends sci-fi with thriller as teens solve a murder. It may be more suited for older teens as alcohol, sex, and drugs play a large role. The...
Today's guest is Stacey Swann. She was one of my professors at the Stanford University Online Novel Writing Certificate program, and I learned so much about writing from her. Her debut novel, Olympus, Texas(Doubleday) was a Good Morning AmericaBook Club selection, an...
The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women is part history, part archeology, and part social criticism of the later re-interpretations of the Icelandic sagas. Brown admits that much of the book is speculation based on archeological finds throughout...
In Sandie Jones’s The Guilt Trip, three couples travel to Portugal for a destination wedding. Rachel and Jack are the sister-in-law and brother of the groom, Will, who is already on site. Their friends Noah and Paige accompany them on the same flight as does Ali, the...
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Negeen Papehn, an #ownvoices author, filling her stories with Iranian women. She was born and raised in southern California, where she currently lives with her husband and two boys. She wasn’t always a writer. A graduate of USC...
My attention was captured within the first paragraph of this delightful, unique, somewhat weird book. It was captivating enough I could suspend disbelief through the entire novel. I loved it! Tiny, a human, has intercourse with a female owl and becomes pregnant with...
This week I am chatting with the effervescent Carly Bloom. She began her writing career as a family humor columnist and blogger, a pursuit she abandoned when her children grew old enough to die from embarrassment. To save their delicate lives, Carly turned to penning...
Initially I had mixed feelings about this book. In the beginning, I felt the author was trying too hard to be literary. I frequently had to look up words in the dictionary (not that this is a bad thing, but it took me out of the story to do so). The Archivist is a...
This week I have the pleasure of visiting with a writer of many talents and many noms de plume. S.M. Goodwin is one of the pen names used by S.M. LaViolette, a Canadian transplant who lives in the mountains of New Mexico. She began writing in 2013 after closing her...
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