I absolutely adore Toni Morrison’s works and have read most of her oeuvre but somehow missed her sole short story, "Recitatif." This edition has a lovely forty-page introduction by Zadie Smith who analyzes and helps readers grasp the story. At its heart, “Recitatif”...
Rainwater is set in Texas during the Great Depression, though judging from the fact that the families there have gardens that actually produce, they are not in the worst areas of the Dust Bowl. Ella Baron runs a boarding house in what was her family’s home. Abandoned...
In The King’s Messenger, Kearsley takes as her inspiration the untimely death of Henry, the heir to the throne of King James (the son of Mary Queen of Scotts) and Queen Anna. The book takes place in 1613 when young Andrew Logan, a Messenger for the King, is sent to...
The Sirens is a two timeline story. One is set in 1800 with two sisters, Eliza and Mary, banished to Australia from England and carried there on the Naiad, a ship that sinks off the Australian shore with the loss of one hundred lives. The other timeline is...
Having just finished penning my own novel about the Dust Bowl, I picked up The Antidote, not knowing it was a book about the Dust Bowl. From the first few words, I developed a severe case of writers-envy—The Antidote is simply extraordinary, and I wish I’d written it....
I LOVE THIS BOOK. It is wildly expensive but worth every penny for its 757 pages. It is nonfiction that is humorous yet erudite. Believe it or not, there are truly some laugh-out-loud moments. Having lived in Italy, I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Florence,...
Weyward is a lovely three point-of-view debut novel about three women who exist four centuries apart (Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019). Their timelines and lives are intertwined and connected by their common family history, their struggle with evil in...
Afraid to Let Grow is the second in the Marriage Survivors Club series, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel without having read the prequel (In the Beginning) or the first in the series (Do Over Daughter). The series involves the intertwined stories of a...
The Whip is a fictionalized biography of a famous Wells Fargo stagecoach driver in California. Charlotte Parkhurst (1812-1879) is dropped at an orphanage as an infant. She soon bonds with a boy named Lee Colton who assumes the role of her protector and best friend,...
The Stolen Queen is a dual-time line story split between Egypt in 1936 and New York in 1978. In the earlier timeline, Charlotte Cross, a budding archeologist, falls in love with a fellow Egyptologist then faces an horrific tragedy that upends her life. She returns to...
I have read the short story prequel (“Witch City Rift”) and Rifted Hearts, the first installment of this fantasy/paranormal/LGBTQ romance, which helps clarify this book and introduces some of the characters, but On a Rift’s Edge is easily read as a standalone novel....
Give me a good thriller or mystery, and I can generally just rip right through it. Saltwater started off so slowly that I had to drag myself to finish it. The characters, for the most part, were entirely despicable, spoiled, and unrelatable. Helen, whose mother died...
Valorie (Val) Dawes, a rookie cop, has been on duty less than two years and has already fired her weapon multiple times—with two fatalities. As a rookie, she faces the usual harassment of any younger cop by older policemen as well as the rampant sexism in her...
In The Shadowy Horses, author Kearsley weaves together past and present in a dark gothic mystery. Archaeologist Verity Grey is in Scotland for a job interview and ends up staying, though her boss—Peter Quinnell, an infamous archaeologist—is eccentric, if not crazy,...
I have to admit that I was sucked into this by the title alone: I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com. I don’t read much erotica because much of it contains what I’ve heard termed “IKEA sex” where one “inserts tab A into slot B” without much...
Helena Echlin’s Clever Little Thing is a devourable psychological thriller full of plot twist after plot twist, lie after lie. Echlin keeps the tension up through tight prose that reveal the main character, Charlotte’s, state of mind, a woman walking on the edge yet...
I recently read The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, a nonfiction book that deals with with America’s part in the race towards atomic weaponry across the US and Europe but doesn’t handle the human...
In the Country of Others is about Mathilde, a young Catholic French woman, falls in love with Amine Belhaj, a Muslim Moroccan soldier who is fighting in France during World War II. She moves to Morocco when he is released from his military service. Briefly they live...
As someone whose ranching family lived through the Dust Bowl and its series of droughts to the point of nearly losing land that had been in the family since the 1870s, I found Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s fascinating. Author Worster does a bang-up job...
I am not usually one for humorous books, but Tartufo caught my eye, largely because it is set in Italy where I lived for a number of years. The village of Lazzarini Boscarino is dying. Young folks have all left, heading to Milan or other big cities. The old mayor died...
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