🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gorgeous, mesmerizing read with a stop-the-clock ending, that you may just find yourself dreaming about, the next time you hear a bird sing outside your window (your very own soul-stirring spark bird). Simon, our third person POV narrator is a thirty-year-old musician, who has never quite managed to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Perhaps the strangest collection of short stories this reader has encountered, this is a hard book to categorize, but an easy book to love. Laugh-out-loud funny in places, often sardonic, absurd and always wildly inventive, these short stories contain some repeating characters and straddle situations, including those involving: inane…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A book that defies black-and-white categorization — filled with fantasy, folklore, magic and fairies, —but if “delightful” was a book genre, “Greenteeth” would be top of its class. Charming, humorous, and imaginative — this is the story of Jenny Greenteeth, who is not technically a “hag” but is a…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A story which has received a number of wonderful reviews, this book ended up not totally hitting the mark for this reader (who may be in the minority here). Julia, the main protagonist and third person POV narrator, begins our tale as a psychologist, working as an executive for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 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,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Little gems of perfection, each of the ten short stories from this collection published in 1990 will sneak up on you, emotionally, letting the reader deep into a life (and its gossamy spiderweb of related lives) for one brief and startling instant. Each a length of ten or twenty…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Creepy and compelling, this suspense novel starts with a bang — a missing person — and evolves steadily into a spine-tingling remote island creepfest — where nothing is quite as it seems, for both Grady, our main first-person POV protagonist, and the reader. Grady Green is a disheartened author,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Achingly beautiful, a book that builds from a gentle start, pooling silently like sunlight as the story takes hold, gradually revealing a radiating luminosity that made this reader, upon reaching the final page, long to begin the story all over again. Drenched with nostalgia that sets a tone that…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A pitch-perfect UK-based thriller with a pair of fabulous main characters, and a kickoff of a whole new series to boot. Written in 2019, this author and his work had previously somehow passed this reader by — a misstep that will now be quickly corrected. Dr Cyrus Haven is…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A book that has been incredibly well-reviewed, and for this reader, unfortunately, fell more than a little flat. A sweeping, ambitious story, this tale begins with the friendship between Patch, a thirteen year-old boy with one eye, and Saint, his best friend, complete with single braid and dungarees. The…