🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Lewis Madigan is, or rather, was, a twenty-four year old software developer. Now Lewis, unemployed and desperate, has the dubious task of caring for Chester Wheeler, his terminally-ill and decidedly unpleasant next-door-neighbor. Chester is homophobic, mean-spirited and totally dependent on external care - a situation made all the more…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ With a main protagonist calling to mind apple pie and sunshine, (still at that difficult stage, but at his essence, a gentle optimist, so clearly packaged up with love), a plot oozing with the bittersweet essence of interminably-awkward high-school ardor, and a backdrop of equal parts excruciating and heart-melting…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ One of my absolute favorites this year, this book is an absolute treasure - a reading experience to be cherished, and in all likelihood, revisited. A great big book, - not in volume, but in absolute capacity to charm and engage, this book held this reader captive from the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part murder-mystery, all character-based slow reveal, this story oozes sweetness and danger in a delectable unwind, a gradual pooling of cloying tension, fear, and poignant urgency as we are forced to question - what do we really know, after all, about those we cannot help but love? Set in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A quick and interesting read, this story has the feel of a longish short-story - a fable of sorts - telling the tale of a complicated family, steeped in love, sacrifice, loss and ultimately redemption, but of a form as unexpected as it is long and exceptionally overdue. Told…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gorgeously-written emotional mine-field, so impeccably crafted these characters will sit with you, telling their stories and holding your heart, long after the final reading. Told from alternating third-person POVs, the story opens us to the world of our main protagonist, Yasmin Ghorami, a London-based junior doctor of Bengali…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 The sequel to the hilarious “Autopsy of a Boring Wife” (a book this reader adored) this edition follows the further adventures of Diane, a middle-aged housewife, deserted by her cheating husband in the first book, and now, two years later, working to regain some of her footing in her…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and sensitive story, centering on grief, and isolation, and terrible loss, - and that elusive chance in a million - that unimaginable happening, encounter or person, that finds a way to slip into a life despairing and stagnant, and just like that, open the door on a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 The final book in a much-loved series, this lovely Christmas edition follows Sam, her husband Josh, and the entire crowd of family, friends (furry included!) that have come to represent familiar and cherished friends for many readers (including this one). As we follow Sam (now thirty-two years old and…