[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ➕ If the Earth itself (wait, make that the “Universe”) could write, this would be its creation. Deeply wise, there’s a core of truth captured with such aching beauty that the images, ideas, and feelings so seamlessly poured into this work surround you, in the manner of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This is the fourth edition of the Hedgehog Hollow series, and the first one I have read - a situation I would love to remedy quickly! Based in the dreamy countryside of Yorkshire Wolds, this delightful book reads like a visit with friends, an extended “family” of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ In parts tender, and almost entirely tragic, I found this short novella incredibly moving. A gentle, compassionate and insightful look at origins, or sources - of identity, shame, grief, anger, despair - (and interestingly, of words themselves) and the roots that provide definition, and a past, that…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “He was everybody’s son, but he belonged to no one”. A complex and poignant portrait of what it means to be a mother, a father, or a son, and what it feels like to have this most central of identities suddenly ripped away. When we first meet…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 An epic and life-changing journey, paused and then culminated, decades later, as our main protagonist, Dan, travels the road to Kathmandu, Nepal. Dan, an often strung-out hippie kid from England, seeking mystery, excitement, adventure, and most of all, freedom from his “cultural straightjacket”, completes a drive…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Join me in this Q&A with Dr. Gail Aldwin, author of “This Much Huxley knows”, as Gail discusses her writing, inspiration and other fascinating facts about the creative process. Q. Where did the inspiration for This Much Huxley Knows come from? A. The idea came from my debut novel The String…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 “I don’t know what to do with the thoughts flying around my head so I stand up and spring my arms high. Perhaps, I can touch the sky. I have a little laugh because it’s a fun idea and the words high and sky make an…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Elise Morgan is ninety years old, has lived the vast majority of her life in Cornwall, and as her eminently capable daughter points out, “has a good, balanced view of things”, including, (alone among her contemporaries), a lack of panic at the large-scaled housing development threatening the…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 I am a fast reader. It will typically take me a day, perhaps two, to read a book, obsessively finding the time to squeeze in more reading for a book that I am particularly enjoying. This book, “The Ballerinas”, broke my pattern apart. Hooking me from…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 Sinking into this book on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea and a cozy blanket; meeting with these characters, their beautifully articulated world and and their mesmerizing stories; I could not imagine a better place to be. Wendell Combs, a strong, somewhat austere military…