🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Strange and beautiful, this engrossing tale cross-crosses time and space in the voice of two intimately-voiced first-person POV narrators. First we have Dr Henry Byrd, a psychiatrist with a traumatic past, who appears to have many secrets that may or may not intersect the world of his current patient…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An emotional look at the complexities of sisterhood, mental illness, and the struggle to understand one’s role in supporting a damaged loved one. Amy Claire Shred is the sister of Olivia (Ollie), who is four years older. Living in the shadow of her beautiful, stubborn, impatient sister, Amy slowly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An interesting premise, leading to an engaging plot, which is chock-full of well-drawn characters. It all begins with a seventy-ish lady, with nice silver hair, neatly dressed and not at all flashy. The kind of woman you might not notice. On this day, on a simple flight from Hobart,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Absurdly wonderful, this 1990s historical exploration focuses on our protagonist’s quest to understand language, love, and their relationship with meaning, in the wildly obscure wonderland of her freshman year at Harvard University. A heroine like no other, Selin Karadag, eighteen years old, is the tallest living member of her…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A bar-hopping, disco-dancing, beer-swilling nostalgic tale outlining the terrors and tribulations of growing up, finding one’s authentic self, and claiming a sexuality problematic in the 1970’s of one’s youth. It’s 1975, and Nicky DeMarco, our third person POV narrator, is an eighteen-year-old freshman, away from his Long Island family…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A haunting, undulating look at the ebbs and flows of love, of aging, of loss - of ordinary life, made extraordinary, then settling back (over time, and pain, and anger and grief) into what is, after all, a life-story maybe live-able after all. Kathleen, one of our two main…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 “If you have gold, you're good for the rest of your life so long as you hide it.” Three generations of women are brought to life on these pages, a strangely hopeful tale of family, class structures, and solace — as each woman’s life, and experiences, indelibly affects the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Every now and then one of those books comes along that makes you stop, take a beat, and reset. This is just such a book - a heartbreaking, gorgeous compendium of interviews, journal entries, and notes concerning who must be (and still is) “the greatest Canadian hero ever”. This,…