Unspoken brings to life a resilient eleven-year-old girl, Ruby Lee Becker, whose family and farm are trapped in the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The recurrent dust storms kill her baby sister and grandmother and leave Ruby with weakened...
My expectations were high for Follow Me To Africa. As a budding paleoanthropologist in my youth and a lover of the Serengeti, I looked forward to discovering more about Mary Leakey’s work as a paleoanthropologist. However, this fictional biography failed to live up to...
The Ancients is a post-apocalyptic climate novel. One family lives a prehistoric-feeling life. They live in isolation in the wilderness trying to survive after the fish and elk they depend on for food begin to disappear. The rest of their tribe has moved on, hoping...
Book 8 of the Countess of Harleigh Mystery series, A Daughter's Guide to Mothers and Murder, continues with Frances and George in Paris during the Paris Olympics and the Paris World's Fair. An acquaintance, Alicia Stoke-Whitney, asks Frances to investigate Alicia’s...
I read The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) in Italian when it was first released in Italy back in 1980. For someone who was only fluent in conversational Italian, it was a tough go, so when it was released in translation in 1983, I read it again and loved it...
During the Napoleonic era in Europe, flowers and their “secret meanings” became a bona fide craze; for example, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, a painter and botanist from the Austrian Netherlands, was renowned for his watercolors of roses, lilies, and other flowers, many of...
Laurus describes the life of a fictional fifteenth-century ascetic Russian folk healer, pilgrim, and monk. Arseny, the protagonist, after his parents die of the plague, is raised by his grandfather, a skilled healer who teaches his grandson both healing and reading...
The Weight of Ink is a three point-of-view (Helen Watt, a British professor with Parkinson’s disease; her graduate student, Aaron Levy; and Ester Velasquez, a Jewish immigrant who serves as a scribe to a blind rabbi who lost his vision in the Inquisition. This is also...
After reading Russell’s The Antidote recently and being enchanted with it, I decided to read some of her older works, beginning with Swamplandia!, her debut novel. Swamplandia! is a family-run tourist attraction on an island in the Everglades. The cast of characters...
River of Lies is the second in author James L’Etoile’s Detective Emily Hunter Mystery series. Though it continues with the same characters both major and minor, it can easily be read as a standalone. I’ve read and enjoyed L’Etoile’s earlier Nathan Parker and Detective...
Kills Well with Others is the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age. A quartet of “women of a certain age,” retired assassins Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are called out of retirement (they’re still waiting on their pensions) by the organization they work for,...
My Name is Emilia del Valle has everything I typically look for in fiction, especially women's fiction and historical fiction: an indomitable female protagonist facing sexism, unjust social mores, and other obstacles in her life. Somehow, this novel fails to deliver...
Each year I look forward to the next installment of the Leaphorn/Chee/Manuelito Navajo mysteries by the father-daughter duo of Tony and Anne Hillerman. Shadow of the Solstice is the 28th novel in the series. They are consistently good reads, and I have read...
The Language of the Birds is a Da Vinci Code-type of young-adult exploit filled with complicated ciphers, codes, puzzles, American history, and conspiracy theories involving Herbert Hoover, the US President who botched the American recovery from the Great Depression....
I was immersed in Roll the Sun Across the Sky from the first line: “The summer before I ruin his life …” Of course, I had to learn how the protagonist, a twenty-four-year-old woman, destroys someone’s life! That the story involves a trip across Europe during the...
The Last Maasai Warrior is a fascinating historical fiction account of British colonization of Kenya which has many parallels to the invasion of North America by Europeans and the ensuing genocide of Native Americans. The British, in 1904, yield the Maasai control of...
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...
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