Hang the Moon blends true events in American history with the English Tudor dynasty with King Henry VIII and his multiple wives and his daughter who becomes Queen Elizabeth I. The names of the characters reflect this background: Seymour, Jane, Tom, Eddie, etc. “Duke”...
Play the Fool is billed as a thriller, but in reality it’s more of a women’s fiction with a mystery thrown in. Katie True is a strong female protagonist, but at times her actions border on sheer stupidity. She’s failed an attempt to live in Chicago and come home to...
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,...
The Lockhart Women by Mary Camarillo doesn’t read as a debut novel. She captures the epitome of a modern dysfunctional family. Stranded through the novel is the television coverage of the 1994-1995 O.J. Simpson murder and later his robbery trials, and each woman...
Annie Beyers, the main character of Kelley McNeil’s debut novel, A Day Like This, seemingly has everything she wants in life: a beautiful yellow farmhouse, a loving spouse, and an adorable daughter, Hannah. When she takes Hannah to the pediatrician, Annie is involved...
The Song of the Cell has achieved myriad accolades, including a NYT Notable Book and Best Book of the Year by Oprah Daily, the Economist, BookPage, Book Riot, and the New York Public Library. In reading it, I found Mr. Mukherjee’s prose to be elegant and...
Clytemnestra is a princess of Sparta; her parents are Tyndareus and Leda (of Leda and the Swan fame). The royal family includes Helen (of Helen of Troy fame), supposedly beget from the rape of Leda by Zeus in the guise of a swan, and several other children. In Sparta,...
Few books are more deserving of a sequel than The Odyssey. In his new book, On Wine-Dark Seas: A Novel of Odysseus and His Fatherless Son Telemachus, Tad Crawford continues the story of The Odyssey from the point of view of Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. Telemachus tells...
The Northern Reach is W.S. Winslow’s debut novel, but it certainly doesn’t read as a beginner’s effort. It is an ambitious collection of interconnected stories (somewhat akin to the structure of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan) told from multiple points...
The White Bone has been in my to-be-read pile for a decade, and I finally got around to reading it. Author Gowdy writes from the point of view of elephants on the African savannah as they face threats from mankind, climate change, and their natural predators. I cannot...
Like M.E. Hilliard’s debut novel, The Unkindness of Ravens, the newest in her Greer Hogan Mystery series, Three Can Keep a Secret, grabbed me from the onset. The first person narration rapidly pulls the reader in the the thought processes of amateur sleuth, Greer...
Initially I had trouble getting into Your Driver Is Waiting because the author's voice is so strident. As I got perhaps a chapter or two into it, though, I realized why and ended up really liking a fresh voice. Damani’s father has just died. Her mother is depressed to...
You'd think a novel set in a cloistered convent populated by nuns following vows of silence would a sleeper. Guess again. Anna Quinn’s Angeline blasts that notion out of the water. Teenaged Meg is the only survivor of an automobile accident that kills her entire...
Until Horse came along, I could never have imagined a book that would fascinate both my race-horse raising brother and me, his art-loving sister. I loved this novel. Author Geraldine Brooks deftly weaves multiple story lines and time frames into a single...
Author Rachel Dacus has authored a series of books tied together by time travelers who are committed to “fixing” errors in history and combating a group called the Optimalists who are equally committed to changing history to further their own agenda. Jane Austen, Time...
Purple Deceiver is the tenth in John Cunningham’s Buck Reilly Adventure Series. Despite being so far into the series, the novel is easily read as a standalone as the author provides enough back story to keep the reader from being lost. After being down on his luck for...
The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris is a nicely-written historical fiction following two timelines, the present and Paris during World War II. In the present, Juliette and her husband, Kevin, have taken a trip to Paris, an event she is more invested in than he is. While...
Anatomy: A Love Story is set in Edinburgh in 1817. Hazel Sinnett is a young woman of seventeen who wants to be a surgeon. Unfortunately, as a member of the upper class, she is destined to marry to provide a rich man an heir, to be pretty, and idle away her life in...
This beauty and horror of this book caught at my heartstrings. Told in first person by a northern Ojibway man, Saul Indian Horse, who has reached the absolute bottom. An alcoholic, his last binge nearly killed him and brought him to a residential treatment center. He...
Observer is a science-fiction novel based on ideas from scientist Robert Lanza (called one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine) and cowritten by Nancy Kress (a Hugo and Nebula Award winning author) and demonstrates an in-depth grasp of science and a...
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