The Blue Between Sky and Water is a lovely book by Susan Abulhawa, the most widely read Palestinian author in history. Like Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water is very pro-Palestine, understandably since Abulhawa’s father was a Palestinian freedom...
A Fine Layer of Dust deals with the stressors that rip a seemingly perfect family apart. Sophia has a great career at a museum while Jake is a lawyer chasing an elusive promotion to senior partner. To achieve that, he’s spending long days away from his wife and...
Bad Country is C.B. McKenzie’s debut novel, a Western noir set in Arizona’s Indian country and the seedy sections of Tucson. The protagonist, Rodeo Grace Garnet, is a former rodeo star who turned private investigator after he broke his back rodeoing. He is...
This is my second reading of The Merchant of Prato, a book I first read in the 1980s, shortly after returning to the US after living for years in Italy and suffering from nostalgia for Tuscany. The small town of Prato is only fifteen miles from Florence and has close...
I adored Sacken’s Annie Hawkins Green novels set in Afghanistan, and she hits a fourth home run with The Women Who Stand Between set in Zimbabwe. When nature cinematographer Julia Wilde's current film ends in a disastrous plane wreck for which she is unjustly blamed,...
This is a review of both books in the Firekeeper's Daughter series. In the first in the series, The Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis Fontaine is a biracial high school senior who’s never fit in with either her white family or her father’s Sugar Land Ojibwa tribe. She’s...
Poison Wood picks up after Moorhead’s debut novel, Broken Bayou, with the story of the one of its characters, the ambitious TV reporter, Rita Meade, who did a documentary series on the serial killer of Broken Bayou. She's pulled into a story based in her own past at a...
A Storm in the Stars purports to be a novel about Mary Shelley; it's right there in the subtitle: A Novel of Mary Shelley. In essence, it is more the story of her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she plays a rather subservient female role. Mary comes from a...
I finished I Who Have Never Known Men several nights ago, and it’s still rattling around in my brain. It’s a superb example of feminist speculative fiction and a reflection on humanity itself. This short, 175-page read delves deeply into the human condition and...
Call of the Camino is a two-timeline, two point-of-view novel. In one, Reina Watkins is a budding writer trapped in a copyediting job. When a fellow journalist loses his passport and can’t make the deadline for the trip, she impulsively volunteers to cover his story...
Long a fan of Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove series, I'm working my way through his oeuvre. McMurtry demonstrates his mastery of writing female characters, ranging from Lorena Wood in Lonesome Dove to Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment. He brings this ability to...
The Architect's Apprentice is a sprawling novel covering more than a century of Turkish history starting in 1540 when a twelve-year-old boy, Jahan, arrives in the city accompanying Chota, an Indian elephant gifted to the Sultan. The Sultan's architect, Sinan, notices...
As soon as the newest Natalie Haynes book comes out, I spring for it, full price and all. I've never been disappointed. She is a master at breathing new life into retellings of Greek myths. Stone Blind, a retelling of Medusa, is no exception. Haynes makes the reader...
Written by a therapist, Visible deals with a therapist, Rachel Karem, who is leading a ten-week group therapy session in an attempt to get five of her clients who seem to have hit their individual impasses at dealing with their various emotional traumas. She hopes...
I heard that Robert Westbrook’s Howard Moon Deer mysteries were the next big series for fans of the Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito Native American mysteries written by the father-daughter duo of Tony and Anne Hillerman. Though disappointed in the first Moon Deer book, Ghost...
How to Align the Stars purports to be a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, though I didn't recognize the latter story except in retrospect—and Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favorite of Shakespeare plays. In How to Align the Stars, an...
From 1948 through 1996, Dee Brown wrote thirty-four books, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. I am slowly working my way through his oeuvre. He is an acclaimed chronicler of the American West, particularly the conflicts between white men and aboriginal tribes, with his...
I heard that Robert Westbrook’s Howard Moon Deer mysteries were the next big series for fans of the Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito Native American mysteries written by the father-daughter duo of Tony and Anne Hillerman. With that in mind, I embarked on this series, beginning...
Having been a physician in the trenches of urgent care, I didn’t see the more severe cases of Covid, but I saw enough to realize the dire circumstances and the panic that pandemic caused around the world. Long an admirer of Dr. Fauci, I truly enjoyed his memoir, On...
Rosie Benson, at age twenty-four, can’t figure out her life. She’s stuck in a job she doesn’t like and isn’t particularly good at, but she’s afraid to disappoint her parents if she quits. She has a great aunt, Dotty, who is a free spirit who offers guidance...
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