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...
After a tropical disease kills her infant son and husband in Ghana in 1894, Dr. Leah Maays returns to her hometown. In Edith’s Bay, Maine, she moves in with her aunt and uncle, Martha and Utterance, owners of a local apple orchard. Martha is as uptight as they come,...
The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder is a complete change of pace from author Stephen Cox’s earlier works, Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, a sci-fi duology about an alien child who lands on earth and is rescued by a human family. Though the subject...
Woman on the Verge deals with maternal ambivalence, those emotions generated when women want to be mothers yet hate mothering itself. Hooper deftly captures the love/hate relationship: the adoring of those tiny bodies loving you while simultaneously being overwhelmed...
I liked Ramona Emerson's Shutter, a blend of police procedural, Native American culture, paranormal, and horror, that I didn't wait long to read the second installment, Exposure. The latter can be read as a stand-alone novel, but reading the first helps set up the...
The Lost Masterpiece blends a contemporary story with a bit of history about the birth of French Impressionism. In the present, Tamara inherits a Manet painting Party on the Seine, featuring Berthe Morisot as the principal figure, a painting looted from its French...
I had hopes of liking Lady Macbeth, purportedly a feminist retelling of the Shakespearean play. However, from the start, it seems doomed to failure. Rather than being a strong female, Lady Macbeth is a whiny seventeen-year-old French girl (Roscille) brought to...
As a former professional photographer, I chose to read Shutter because it involved photography. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. She is Navajo, but she’s an anomaly. Despite her culture’s teachings and taboos about...
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