🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gripping and evocative look at identity, belonging and the quest to resolve both, particularly when in conflict with society’s expectations. Stella and Desiree are identical twins, black by heritage yet so light-skinned they could pass for white, a possibility that holds promise in the racially explosive nineteen-sixties and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Wow. This is an exceptional read - one that is truly unique and deeply, profoundly, unsettling. Strange Sally Diamond is indeed strange, but she is also heartbreakingly vulnerable, a character written with such authenticity that once you get to know her, her voice will begin to haunt you. One…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ‘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…
