🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ With a main protagonist calling to mind apple pie and sunshine, (still at that difficult stage, but at his essence, a gentle optimist, so clearly packaged up with love), a plot oozing with the bittersweet essence of interminably-awkward high-school ardor, and a backdrop of equal parts excruciating and heart-melting…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautiful and lyrical story, with an unusual writing style and more than a hint of magic and lore. Told mainly in the first-person voice of Samuel of Cologne, Sam’s story is augmented by the journals and letters of secondary narrators, criss-crossing back and forth in time to present…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 💫 Heartwarming and cozy, like cocoa before a warm fire, this book explores the random thoughts and musings expressed by a group of actors, creatives, writers, directors and artists, (most of them with only a personal, and not professional, involvement with food) when asked to create an essay for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 From the very start I have loved Louise Penny’s books, having read every one of them, with the joy and eagerness that comes with revisiting a special world, populated with old friends, beginning with Armand Gamache and extending to (almost) every single character who resides in Three Pines (I…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An interesting character-based crime story - more a meandering, engaging, mystery-rich novel rather than a more typical police procedural, this book also serves to introduce DC Gabrielle Darin in the first of a series featuring Gaby and her Wales-based detective team. The story of Izzy, a twenty-something, pretty but…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Q: What do you get when you combine the camaraderie of the gang in the Oceans Eleven series, the plotting and intrigue of a newish James Bond movie, the hard-boiled romance of an old time Humphrey Bogart flick, and the epic-action-adventure-mayhem of a Marvel comic-book? A: this latest installment…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sensuous, extravagant look at the bounty of trees, focusing primarily on the aromas and smells they contribute as a (perhaps under-recognized) sumptuous and multi-layered texture to our everyday world. Written with the delicacy and grace of a poet, informed by the science and insight of the biologist he…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ One of my absolute favorites this year, this book is an absolute treasure - a reading experience to be cherished, and in all likelihood, revisited. A great big book, - not in volume, but in absolute capacity to charm and engage, this book held this reader captive from the…
Book 21 in the Temperance Brennan Series 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Just in case there is any reader out there not familiar with this series (it could happen!), Temperance Brennan, the sometimes irascible, always ingenious forensic-anthropologist, ex-alcoholic, divorced mother of kick-butt Katy Peterson, is a force to be reckoned with. As she performs…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Salamanti, translated to mean “Cheers” in Persian, is exactly that - a gorgeous and cheering montage of beautiful recipes, bursting with seasonal flavor, herbs, and vegetables, welcoming the reader into a mouth-watering world of Persian cooking, where each meal is a deeply-rooted communal experience, as much a gateway to…