🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ is a remarkably charming book. Narrated, in part, by an Octopus (yes you heard me right), Marcellus McSquiddles, is a sixty-pound Giant Pacific, who has lived the vast majority of his life in an aquarium tank in Puget Sound. Without giving this wonderful plot away, (no…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Quietly spectacular, this story, and the two sisters whose lives are revealed, slowly and uncomfortably, through its pages, creeps up on you, slipping into the corners of your heart and leaving you dazzled. As Joyce, our forty-nine year-old first person POV narrator, and her sister Lydia, both divorced and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 What, after all, is a storyteller? In this seething exposé, itself the work of a fictional storyteller crafted by a real-life storyteller, “ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart”, June Hayward, aka Juniper Song, takes us deep into the “grotesque” world of commercial publishing, from a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Like slipping into a treasured sweater, this book will wrap you up in layers of emotion, familiarity and warmth, as you come to know, and love, the characters in this book. Sisters Liane, Ilsa, and Fiona, each in their thirties, are the children of Helen, a successful folk-singer of…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A feminist look at love, empowerment and body image, which has admirable intentions and several thoughtful and appealing elements but did not completely hit the mark for me. Abby is a plus-sized woman who has been treated shamefully by her mother (and likely others) since childhood. This part of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A stylistic love-child of sorts, Joanna Trollope meets Marian Keyes, rich with vulnerable, mildly self-informed people, seeking a way forward in lives that feel filled with hardships. That aren’t necessarily so. If one could just shift perspective, ever so slightly. The story is written in the voice of Rachel…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “This was it, forever! Maybe!” Equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking, a memoir-like fictional rendering raising the question: Just how far is one Millennial willing to go towards (or away from) a newly adjusted life, uncoupled? Maggie, our first person POV narrator, is 28 yrs old, - a smartly sarcastic…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A book awash with yearning, love, and the simple sweetness of family, - held afloat by ties as deep as time, now tested by the ravages of dementia. For Joey Green, our first person POV narrator, a trip back to Beaufort, South Carolina, to visit his parental home, is…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ As heartbreaking as it gets, this story, from the first page to the absolutely riveting ending, completely captivated this reader, - so much so that my lump in the throat test (a sure fire predictor of my very favorite reads) echoed feelings left both stirred and shaken. A slowly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A heart-rending look at love (for others and mostly, for self) and survival, and the not-always-lucid path we may take in service of both. As this character-based narrative slowly reveals (gracefully and with pitch-perfect pacing), plagued with insecurities, unable to shed uniquely devastating pasts, emerging into the light comes…
