🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 First, a confession. I have loved pretty much everything written by this author. So approaching this, the seventh in the series featuring the riotous, charming and thoroughly hilarious Walsh family, my expectations were high. And to a very large extent, they were met. All my favorite Walsh’s are here,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An unrelenting read that works its way deep inside your head, leaving thoughts and impressions that have lingered with this reader, beyond the page. Knife River, a small town in NY, based in a valley between two forests, is the setting for this atmospheric tale of sisters tormented by…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A haunting saga about growing up different, disconnected and isolated, and the winding journey a life can take in its journey through to rootedness. Diamond, our first-person POV narrator, is a uniquely authentic voice. A young black girl whose narrative age varies from nine or so to sixteen, as…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟A beautifully-written story about being seen - a feeling so addictive and rapturous, once encountered, nothing can stand in its way. And so we meet Tatum Vega, the first person POV narrator of this story, a young Latina woman, living in San Antonio, Texas. A Literature and Fine Arts college…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautifully-written, heartbreakingly twisty tale of star-crossed lovers, who may in fact, now get a second chance to be together, almost forty years after their original romance. Sarah Carson Blackwell is sixty-ish, divorced, with two grown children, and is long used to living alone. (Note: well, not quite alone,…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Well-written, yet undeniably bleak, this is an 80’s era (both written and set) tale of domestic breakdown, existential nothingness, and bodies in motion, - unlikable characters bumping into each other randomly and in the process, spinning out trails invariably murky and mostly unpleasant. Set in Melbourne, Australia, the story…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 What a delight! A book just as likely to break your heart as it is to tickle your funny bone, this charmer is a one-of-a-kind read, featuring a one-of-a-kind family who, come what may, will love and support their offspring. (And their offspring. And all the interconnected others that…