🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 “Sports and war are two of the world’s greatest equalizers”. A Canadian author/teacher’s exhaustively and beautifully-researched treatise into the history of sport, focusing on the systemic racially-abusive treatment of black, indigenous and other marginalized communities (including Japanese-Canadians) from the earliest days of organized amateur and professional leagues, to what…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.” What is play, or gaming, but “the possibility of a different world”? “The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.” An epic of a read,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As much a sweet and immersive love-story as it is a cracking-good small(ish)-town detective story, this book got under my skin and into my heart in a way that was totally unexpected. Ben Ames, our first-person POV narrator, is an ex-cop, now running a one-man PI agency in Calgary,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “And that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.” A gloriously uplifting fairy-tale of sorts, helping us consider the wonder of, not “happily ever after”, but its infinitely richer cousin - the power and promise of the ethereally beautiful “hopefully ever after” - a path…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Shockingly-twisty, tense and engrossing, this character-driven thriller veers between two equally-fascinating and fractured worlds. Marisa Grover, twenty-eight-years old, caramel-blonde and an illustrator of children’s fairy tales, is a damaged woman. Abandoned at a young age by her mother, Marissa ‘s short life thus far has her feeling left-behind, profoundly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dazzling and beautiful as it is thoughtful and heart-wrenching, this speculative fiction narrative centers on the indescribable pain and beauty of motherhood, and the mysterious and horrifying related “affliction” one small and isolated community has found themselves subject to. Somehow, some way, this unnamed town has developed a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 If you can’t beat em, join em? A NY-based secret society of powerful women, helping each other through influence-peddling and a whole lot more - modeled on the corrupt and seedy old-boys-club networks that have crisis-crossed the social, political and economic landscape of movers and shakers dominating the ruling…
[ 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Claustrophobic and creepy, this book will send you down rabbit-holes and have your head spinning as you follow this narrator, 39 year old psychologist Naomi Chandler, and her crazy, unsettling story. Just what is real, what is imagined, and what is the result of trauma, long-buried, in the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A brisk, entertaining, well-written and engaging police procedural, this series follows the caseload of New Scotland Yard DCI Steve Burt, Head of the Special Resolutions unit, where he leads a team (mostly assembled case-by-case) of crackerjack detectives and specialists tasked with resolving the serious crimes that no other department…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Riveting, exquisitely detailed and beautifully rendered, the true-life story of a remarkable and exclusively feminine society, gathered at the turn of the twentieth century in Greenwich Village, NY, in an informal and highly-connected club - a powerhouse of informed, educated and motivated champions, prepared to weigh in on the…