🌟🌟🌟🌟 A terrific all-around read — combining a mystery, a love story and a whole lot of historical intrigue — all wrapped up in a multiple-POV, multiple-timeframe narrative that makes for a unique and mesmerizing experience. Greta Schneider and her family are native East Germans, living in Berlin in 1982,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A fascinating, meticulously-researched story starring both William Shakespeare, and a real-life sixteenth-century convicted murderess, Alice Arden. Told in alternating first-person voices of each of the main protagonists, the story oscillates between the timeline leading up to Alice’s involvement in the historical murder, which took place in 1551, and Shakespeare’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “As long as I could return to the library in my mind, I felt I could face whatever came." An engaging historical drama, beginning in 1918, opening the door on a little-known group of women, female volunteers with the American Committee for Devastated France (abbreviated as “CARDs”when translated from…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…
The story of Daisy Shoemaker, who ranges in age from fifteen, at the start of the story, to her coming-of-age at twenty-one. Daisy is a fictional character, based on historically accurate research on the appalling lives of girls and women in fundamentalist Mormon polygamist (FLDS) sects as existed in the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An exceptional read, with dozens of interesting characters and their stories, a historical perspective, and a thought-provoking message - bundled with gorgeous depictions of nature and its glory. This book is a literary (so historical it is almost scholarly) look at life surrounding, subsuming and begetting more life in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A spellbinding book, based on historical events, that broke my heart but also mended it, (craggily and with herbs, twine, and a whole lot of love). The year is 1936, and the world is reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. As the author evokes the sweeping desperation…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 I do so love a good gothic novel. All the elements are here, at this author’s hands, building into a hauntingly mesmerizing read that hits all the right notes, keeping this reader thoroughly hooked, - right up to an ending not unpredictable but so perfectly fitting it appears to…
Second in the Paradise Cafe series, this is another interesting, enjoyable read, with a likable heroine, an evocative setting in Depression-era 1936 Toronto, and not one, but two mysteries to solve. When Charlotte Frayne, PI, is hired to investigate the suspicious suicide of a severely disfigured veteran, she must confront…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An engaging, interesting and strangely comforting read, - the first in a series that is historical, absorbing and not quite a cosy, but peopled with characters and a setting the reader can immediately relate to and feel comfortable with, and a plot that beckons one sink right into it,…