🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A book awash with yearning, love, and the simple sweetness of family, - held afloat by ties as deep as time, now tested by the ravages of dementia. For Joey Green, our first person POV narrator, a trip back to Beaufort, South Carolina, to visit his parental home, is…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ As heartbreaking as it gets, this story, from the first page to the absolutely riveting ending, completely captivated this reader, - so much so that my lump in the throat test (a sure fire predictor of my very favorite reads) echoed feelings left both stirred and shaken. A slowly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ A slim volume packed with luminous insight, cleverly recursive in its themes of time, love and death, and surrounding it all - a haunting ode to awareness, and the infinitely contradictory path a lifetime of self-reflection, (peppered with the unconscious memories and associations of decades spent learning) opens us…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A startlingly beautiful historical-fictionalized look at human life in an ancient time, which although easily seen as bleak, desperate and despotic, can also also be seen, (if one looks only a little deeper, and through the eyes of the wonderful characters depicted here), as hopeful, tender, brave and even…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A wildly imaginative ride through the past, and the present, and the silken threads that weave both together, featuring faeries, griffons, unicorns, giants and other creatures as strange and as wonderful as human dreams, hopes and imaginings are able to construct. Once there was a girl named Marjan Dastani,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A cozy, crazy tapestry of lives and loves, heartfelt friends, caring onlookers and the others, the-not-so-kind, who are willing to cross the line to make their lives that little bit of better. Based in the Yorkshire town of Thirsk, and told in the the voices of three retired primary-school…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A heart-rending look at love (for others and mostly, for self) and survival, and the not-always-lucid path we may take in service of both. As this character-based narrative slowly reveals (gracefully and with pitch-perfect pacing), plagued with insecurities, unable to shed uniquely devastating pasts, emerging into the light comes…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A riveting, poignant, suspenseful look at the highs and the lows of love, marriage, and the opening of one’s heart, (as raw and vulnerable as it gets) to the dreams and dispositions of another. A particular other. (And what a difference that choice can make). Told in the first…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A combination of short, edgy crime stories, and a few that are somewhat longer, (chapter-based), the final one featuring a trainee Detective Kay Hunter (who is featured a long-running book series). With the author’s knack for writing atmospheric, twisty short stories, many of which contain clever and surprising endings,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 A sly and clever mashup of perhaps the most dysfunctional family ever, a stylishly-plotted mystery, and a behind-the-scenes fantastical look at the audacious lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, all rolled into one addictively-suspenseful package that is sure to keep you reading. Alana is a thirty-something volunteer at a…