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An author blog from a Texas girl who’s seen the world…
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BOOK REVIEW: First Course by Jenn Bouchard

Janie Whitman, the protagonist in First Course, undergoes a life-changing twenty-four hours. First, she loses her job in Chicago and the boyfriend/boss there breaks up with her. Then, hard on those happenings, her parents die in a plane crash, and her sister, Alyssa,...

Enter My Holiday Giveaway!

One lucky participant will win: A hand-made cozy scarf A signed copy of A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE Bookish print swag Click here to enter, or use the widget below. No purchase necessary. The more ways you enter, the more your chances of winning. Good luck and have fun!...

A Halloween story: Morrigan

  Morrigan © Suanne Schafer A whistled song disturbs my sleep. Just outside the churchyard, I lie, warm and drowsy, buried within the earth, roofed by a grove of dark pines whose fallen needles and verdant mosses quilt my bed. Loath to leave a lovely pleasure, I...

New Book Trailer! Hunting the Devil

In case you missed it in my newsletter and here on the front and book pages of my website, here's the new goosebump-inducing book trailer for Hunting the Devil. I hope you love it as much as I do! 😈📚🎬

Enter My Summer-Into-Fall Book Lovers Giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive a signed paperback copy of A Different Kind of Fire, a handmade beaded velvet bookmark, and a Hunting the Devil book bag. Ends at Midnight/CT on September 5th Good luck and have fun! a Rafflecopter giveaway

Enter My First Springtime Giveaway

More daylight = more time to read, so it felt like the perfect occasion for a new bookish giveaway! 🌞📚One lucky winner will receive an eBook copy of A Different Kind of Fire, and a $10 Amazon gift card. This one ends a week from today, so get in while you can. Click...
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BOOK REVIEW: La Vie, According to Rose by Lauren Parvizi

BOOK REVIEW: La Vie, According to Rose by Lauren Parvizi

La Vie, According to Rose, Lauren Parvizi’s debut, is a thought-provoking novel that covers a lot of ground.  First, it’s a heartfelt story of self-discovery coupled with grief and family issues. Rose, the eldest daughter of an Iranian man who escaped Iran just as the...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Spare Room by  Andrea Bartz

BOOK REVIEW: The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz

Andrea Bartz continues to explore complicated female relationships in her works, laced with suspense and sinister overtones, which expand the usual range of emotions women generally have in fiction. I always enjoy seeing what she's cooked up between her female...

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BOOK REVIEW: Clytemnestra’s Bind by Susan C. Wilson

BOOK REVIEW: Clytemnestra’s Bind by Susan C. Wilson

Queen Clytemnestra, happily married to Tantalus and with a newborn son, is devastated when Agamemnon, a rival to the throne of Mycenae, retakes the throne, kills her husband and son, then forces her to marry him. She has three children by Agamemnon, two daughters...

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BOOK REVIEW: You Can Trust Me by Wendy Heard

BOOK REVIEW: You Can Trust Me by Wendy Heard

You Can Trust Me is an exciting thriller that grabs the reader from the start. Every character is far more than what they seem. Couple that with two unreliable narrators, and the reader is drawn further into the world of drifters and ultra-rich billionaires with each...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

BOOK REVIEW: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

The Wind Knows My Name begins with Kristallnacht and ends with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Samuel Adler, a five-year-old Jewish boy, is sent to England in 1938 to hopefully survive the extermination of the Jews in Germany. The novel then moves to the present and...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Blue (Genevieve Planché #1) by  Nancy Bilyeau

BOOK REVIEW: The Blue (Genevieve Planché #1) by Nancy Bilyeau

The Blue is a historical thriller set in France and England in mid 18th century. Porcelain is a huge commodity, so much so that the obsession over porcelain brings to mind the Dutch obsession with tulips a century earlier. Britain and France are duking it out over the...

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BOOK REVIEW: The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield

BOOK REVIEW: The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield

The Embroidered Book, a historical fantasy, follows the Hapsburg girls, Maria Carolina and Marie Antoinette from childhood to becoming monarchs of Naples and France respectively. This is a well-researched volume which takes the history of these two women and binds it...

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BOOK REVIEW: A Court at Constantinople by Anthony Earth

BOOK REVIEW: A Court at Constantinople by Anthony Earth

As someone who's lived around the world, I know firsthand how cultures can collide, and the book, A Court at Constantinople, does a great job showing just that. After the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), Turkey wants to expand its international reputation and is selling...

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BOOK REVIEW: Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

BOOK REVIEW: Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

Hester is a marvelous, sensual tale which envisions a young Scottish immigrant, Isobel Gamble, as she arrives in Salem, Massachusetts. When abandoned there by her husband, she mets and falls immediately in love with the just-out-of-college Nathaniel Hawthorne. As...

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BOOK REVIEW: Our Wolves by Luanne Castle

BOOK REVIEW: Our Wolves by Luanne Castle

I always enjoy Luanne Castle’s poetry and its connection to our past and to nature. Our Wolves is a bit of a departure from that, but one I thoroughly enjoyed. Here, Castle subverts the old fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood” and, though a unique combination of...

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BOOK REVIEW: Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir by Lee Durkee

BOOK REVIEW: Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir by Lee Durkee

Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint is fascinating. Author Durkee is honest about his abuse of Adderall and alcohol while consumed with his obsession with finding the definitive portrait of William...

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BOOK REVIEW: Night of Fire by Colin Thubron

BOOK REVIEW: Night of Fire by Colin Thubron

I enjoyed Night of Fire. Its structure is somewhat akin to A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan in that it is a series of short stories bound together by a rather subtle common thread, in the case of Night of Fire, a rooming house going up in flames, one floor...

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BOOK REVIEW: The View from Half Dome by Jill Caugherty

BOOK REVIEW: The View from Half Dome by Jill Caugherty

Set in San Francisco during the Great Depression, The View from Half Dome is the story of sixteen-year-old Isabel Dickinson. After her longshoreman father dies on the docks, she and her family (her mother, a teenaged brother James, and a nine-year-old sister) move to...

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BOOK REVIEW: Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger

BOOK REVIEW: Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger

Lightning Strike is the eighteenth of twenty Cork O’Connor mysteries, a new-to-me mystery series. I started with #18 because it’s the prequel to the rest of the series. I recently read Krueger’s extraordinary novel, Ordinary Grace, which is a beautifully-written...

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BOOK REVIEW: Hyacinth by Minerva Spencer

BOOK REVIEW: Hyacinth by Minerva Spencer

I raced through Hyacinth in one evening. Regency historical romance tends to bog down in descriptions of the ton and its rigid social mores and not have a lot of pizzazz, so I really welcomed a novel with a neuro-divergent heroine with an aversion to touch and a...

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BOOK REVIEW: Downfall by Mark Rubinstein

BOOK REVIEW: Downfall by Mark Rubinstein

Downfall is a fast-paced novel set in New York City in the 1980s. It is something of a mashup of a police procedural and character-driven fiction and includes the points of view of the two detectives, a physician, Richard Shepard, whose father is murdered, and the...

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BOOK REVIEW: Bloodlines by Chris Bishop

BOOK REVIEW: Bloodlines by Chris Bishop

Bloodlines is the fourth of a trilogy that has turned into a five-book series, The Shadow of the Raven. I have not read books one through four, but as I’ve read all of Bernard Cornwell’s The Warrior Chronicles, I had no trouble following the storyline and characters....

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BOOK REVIEW: Silver in the Bone by  Alexandra Bracken

BOOK REVIEW: Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken

Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken is the first in a series of Arthurian legend-inspired Young Adult fantasies set in contemporary Boston and  Avalon. I found Bracken has written less a retelling of the Arthurian legends and more used them as a springboard into a...

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