[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 “Why should a recipe book not be a thing of beauty?” Perhaps not such an outrageous concept - but in the year 1835, in a town such as Tonbridge, Kent, where poverty, disease and the harshness of scratching out a living can overwhelm much of the…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Book 5 in the DI Jack MacIntosh series, this was the first in this series that I had read, and I found it worked well as a stand-alone mystery. (A few blanks, though, would definitely have been filled in more fully with a reading of the entire…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 The fourth in the DS Nikita Parekh series, this book can be read as a standalone novel (although, in the case of this reader, there is an evolving backstory with Nikki’s family that is begging for more background. I will have to find a way to…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ➕ If the Earth itself (wait, make that the “Universe”) could write, this would be its creation. Deeply wise, there’s a core of truth captured with such aching beauty that the images, ideas, and feelings so seamlessly poured into this work surround you, in the manner of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Anyone who has been through a painful divorce, or a bad break-up, or really, faced any sort of momentous romantic rejection (and which of us hasn’t?) will relate to the main protagonist of this book, Claire Everett, and the emotional quandary she faces, heart-wrenchingly detailed in these…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 Who do we fall in love with, and why? A question no-one can really answer, least of all our two main protagonists, whose life stories criss-cross time and generations in this poignant and compelling story. Netta Wilde, a fifty-one year old divorced mother of two, has…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 DCI Evan Warlow - wait, make that ex-DCI Evan Warlow - has retired, at 50, and is planning to spend the rest of his days completing the renovation of his much-loved cottage, enjoying long walks on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, with his best-buddy-black-lab, Cadi. Nursing a…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This is the fourth edition of the Hedgehog Hollow series, and the first one I have read - a situation I would love to remedy quickly! Based in the dreamy countryside of Yorkshire Wolds, this delightful book reads like a visit with friends, an extended “family” of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐⭐⭐1/2 Impeccably researched and historically rich, this book details the troubling story of Lady Isabelle d’Albret Courteault, beginning in the year 1453, as she must manage events in her life that are brutal, intense, and not that uncommon in this turbulent historical context. A mystic with visions and…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2 In this charming picture book (ages six to nine), enter the magical world of Evelyn, a sweet little girl who is fascinated with the night sky and the planets, stars and constellations. Every evening after dinner, in her backyard, often accompanied by her lovely father, Evelyn learns…