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...
Someone who follows my Facebook page recently reacted to my posting of a Trump for Leavenworth meme and advised me that writers should stay out of politics. I am sorry, but I thoroughly disagreed. My two novels, Hunting the Devil and A Different Kind of Fire (soon to...
Broken Bayou is author Jennifer Moorhead’s debut thriller. Protagonist Willa Watters, a child psychologist with a new book to promote, throws herself off the deep end during her first major television interview about the book. To escape the blowback, she returns to...
I enjoyed The Poppy Field very much, reading it in two sittings. An evangelical preacher from Indiana is called to preach the Gospel in Guatemala and drags his wife and two children there very much against their will. From the moment they land, they are faced with...
An Art Lover's Guide to Paris and Murder (A Countess of Harleigh Mystery) is the seventh in the Countess of Harleigh cozy mystery series, set in London in 1900. In this story, the reader finds newly-wed Frances, the Countess of Harleigh, persuading her new husband,...
Molly Malloy and the Angel of Death is an oddball, often laugh-out-loud funny, romance. It was really refreshing to read such an atypical romance. There are no handsome billionaires, no rich doctors, no sexy shape-shifters, no hot hunks in kilts; instead, the female...
I had a hard time getting into Hearts that Cut. I suspect it might have helped to have read the first of the duology (Threads that Bind) before digging into this one. I simply never felt settled or oriented until about one-third of the way through. I found it so...
The Weaver and the Witch Queen is not a Norse myth retelling, but a reimagining of the origin of the “Mother of Kings,” who began the lineage of the Norse kings. This is a blending of Norse tales from Egil’s Saga and Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla with Gornichec’s...
As always, Kathryn Gauci's research is impeccable as she returns to the Middle East with Midnight in Istanbul after her last book being set in the Pyrenees. She really captures the atmosphere of Istanbul, its food and culture, as well as its post-Ataturk cosmopolitan...
Divine Might is not a retelling of the Greek and Roman myths or even an in-depth look at the pantheon, but a marvelous female-centric take at the ancient Greek and Roman goddesses, looking particularly at those females who are strong enough to rival their male...
Gazelle is a fascinating glimpse of the expatriate world in Cairo in the 1950s. Lizzie, a thirteen year-old American girl, her mother, and her father (an expert on war) have moved there because of the father’s Fulbright scholarship. The mother, a blonde Scandinavian,...
A Quantum Love Story is a quantum physics meeting Fifty First Dates sort of romance; though it doesn’t meet the Romance Writers of America definition of a romance, it is a slow-burn romance that fizzles out before true completion. When a San Francisco particle...
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is a novella that retells the Norse myths, covering the history of the world from creation to destruction, through the eyes of a woman looking back at her childhood during World War II. She and her mother have evacuated from London to the...
Dinosaur Summer is a coming-of-age story set in an alternate past after the two world wars. On a plateau in South America, dinosaurs still exist. In the 1920s, the creatures were captured and used in circuses. The top circus at the time was the Lothar Gluck Circus...
Give me a book about art and artists, and I’m a happy reader. I find Blue Ruin particularly interesting because it raises many questions about what art is, what it’s like to produce it, and how much of an artist’s life is performance. I'm still pondering it several...
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