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...
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...
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