🌟🌟🌟🌟 What makes a ‘good’ day for a dysfunctional family? A family made so, in large part, due to unresolved trauma, seeping over time into life-altering mental illness. Betty and Greg Laramie made absolutely terrible parents, eventually forcing them to give up their daughter, Charlie, to foster care. With Betty…
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick — aka “Mad Mabel” — is eighty-one years old. A tough-talking (tender-hearted?) and deeply humorous octogenarian, six-feet tall with broad shoulders, Mabel puts up with nothing from any-one, least of all the mousy neighborhood child Persephone, or her much-lamented nemesis, the ninety-three year old Ishaan and his…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Strange and beautiful, this engrossing tale cross-crosses time and space in the voice of two intimately-voiced first-person POV narrators. First we have Dr Henry Byrd, a psychiatrist with a traumatic past, who appears to have many secrets that may or may not intersect the world of his current patient…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Houses remember” A gorgeously-narrated audio book, providing a sumptuous peek into the lives of two pairs of women, one in current day, and the other in 1974. In each case, the story told by one of the women is intricate, richly textured, and compelling - in particular as it…
A sweet story, straddling the line between warm and bubbly contemporary romance, and a tender, heartrending treatise on loss, grief, and finding one’s path through what may feel overwhelmingly insurmountable. Pen (Penelope) Auberge is thirty-two years old, a financial wizard and an avid cyclist, with social skills that leave much…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A fast read with a twisty plot, focusing on a neighborhood populated by a collection of accessible characters, each of them hiding secrets and living a life very different from which it appears. Lena Clarke, a 32 year old business owner, recently betrayed by her partner of eleven years…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and sad story, told carefully and sensitively, with a message at its core that is grimly realistic and at the same time, somewhat hopeful. When Shelley Woodhouse comes to in a UK hospital, very few things are clear. For Shelley has suffered a significant brain injury, has…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “We’re all interconnected , and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.” A book about damaged people, choices, and most of all, about love - the complicated, fierce love between sisters, the compassionate love of lifelong friends, the synergistic love of team mates, and the earth-shattering…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “We were born to be real, not perfect”. A sweetly wistful tale of aging, regrets, and second (or third, or even fourth) chances as we follow the Mallorca-based adventures of a group of British sixty-ish female friends, charmingly naming themselves “the Old Ducks”. A Hen party in sunny Spain,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A complex, challenging and thoroughly mesmerizing read. Rosalind Fisher is eighteen years old, a freshman at a preppy Ontario University. An unlikable character, Rosalind is self-absorbed, shallow, and focused on the single-minded pursuit of the ‘cool’ kids, who she believes will automatically bolster her own insipid image. And Rosalind…