🌟🌟🌟🌟 A terrific all-around read — combining a mystery, a love story and a whole lot of historical intrigue — all wrapped up in a multiple-POV, multiple-timeframe narrative that makes for a unique and mesmerizing experience. Greta Schneider and her family are native East Germans, living in Berlin in 1982,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Achingly beautiful, a book that builds from a gentle start, pooling silently like sunlight as the story takes hold, gradually revealing a radiating luminosity that made this reader, upon reaching the final page, long to begin the story all over again. Drenched with nostalgia that sets a tone that…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A read for my library book club, I found myself reading this gorgeous novel pretty much straight through. A story that sharply, without apology or sugar-coating, cuts through it all — our global predilection for NIMBY-ism, hate, and hypocrisy, underscored by generations of war and conquest — to lay…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Like a giant ball of fluffy wool, this absolutely delightful read will tangle you up completely, so sweetly snug you will want to stay more than a while. Written to take place over a three-day period, this book is narrated in the first-person voice of Gail Baines, a sixty-one…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An emotionally gripping story, highlighting the debilitating trail cut by grief, loss, fear and self-shaming. Narrated in turn by Kyle McCray, a fortyish mechanic, now living in Spokane, Washington and his ex-wife, Casey, who remained behind two-and-a-half years ago in their home and hometown of Potsdam NY, Kyle’s losses…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…