🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Intricate and haunting, this is a book to sink into. Packed with interesting characters, loose ends, and cryptic sub-plots, it’s a wonder the author manages to tie it all together so neatly in the end. The third in a series featuring disgraced ex-cop and now PI-wannabe Angie Pallorino, this…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A tension-filled decades-long look at the rawness of need - the things we think, or perhaps are lucky enough to know, we need - to make us whole - and what may be unleashed in our compulsion to find them. Told in the alternating intimate first-person POV voices of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Reading this book again (this time for a book club discussion) - the first in the fabulous Three Pines series - eighteen years after my initial read, was a rare and sublime treat. Eighteen books later, this is a series so familiar and delightful to this reader, that, going…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 I love Maeve Binchy’s books, and this latest endearing read from her, completed just before her untimely passing in 2012, is no exception. With all the warmth and charm of the author’s signature style, this book deviates slightly to initially follow our main 3rd-person-POV protagonist, Chicky, for a period…
My second read from this talented author; this is a twisty, sinister story that cannot help but evoke echoes of the atmosphere and tension of the terrible true-life crime story of Gabby Petito. With a spectacularly intimate feel, aided by the first-person POV voice of our main protagonist, Cassie Peters…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ 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…