🌟🌟🌟💫 A family saga centering on three siblings - each dealing with their messy, shameful childhood in their own way. As questionable decisions, secrets and misguided deceptions mount, its pretty clear there are no easy answers to the age old question - just how far are we willing to go…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 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…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A feminist look at love, empowerment and body image, which has admirable intentions and several thoughtful and appealing elements but did not completely hit the mark for me. Abby is a plus-sized woman who has been treated shamefully by her mother (and likely others) since childhood. This part of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part murder-mystery, all character-based slow reveal, this story oozes sweetness and danger in a delectable unwind, a gradual pooling of cloying tension, fear, and poignant urgency as we are forced to question - what do we really know, after all, about those we cannot help but love? Set in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A quick and interesting read, this story has the feel of a longish short-story - a fable of sorts - telling the tale of a complicated family, steeped in love, sacrifice, loss and ultimately redemption, but of a form as unexpected as it is long and exceptionally overdue. Told…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and sensitive story, centering on grief, and isolation, and terrible loss, - and that elusive chance in a million - that unimaginable happening, encounter or person, that finds a way to slip into a life despairing and stagnant, and just like that, open the door on a…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana-based owner of the longest established, most reputable and only local detective agency entirely run by ladies, is back in fine form in this latest installment of the always-wonderful #1LadiesDetectiveAgency series. With her gentle goodness, old-school Botswanan morality and “ability to see the whole…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 The final book in a much-loved series, this lovely Christmas edition follows Sam, her husband Josh, and the entire crowd of family, friends (furry included!) that have come to represent familiar and cherished friends for many readers (including this one). As we follow Sam (now thirty-two years…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dazzling and beautiful as it is thoughtful and heart-wrenching, this speculative fiction narrative centers on the indescribable pain and beauty of motherhood, and the mysterious and horrifying related “affliction” one small and isolated community has found themselves subject to. Somehow, some way, this unnamed town has…