🌟🌟🌟🌟 Jenny Finney Boylen, a self-proclaimed bookish, goofy (outwardly male) college professor, knew from an early age that she was a girl inside — a transgender path she did not follow until she reached her forties. Exactly how that journey unfolded, the changes encountered and the spaces left unfilled cannot…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Little gems of perfection, each of the ten short stories from this collection published in 1990 will sneak up on you, emotionally, letting the reader deep into a life (and its gossamy spiderweb of related lives) for one brief and startling instant. Each a length of ten or twenty…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Creepy and compelling, this suspense novel starts with a bang — a missing person — and evolves steadily into a spine-tingling remote island creepfest — where nothing is quite as it seems, for both Grady, our main first-person POV protagonist, and the reader. Grady Green is a disheartened author,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Achingly beautiful, a book that builds from a gentle start, pooling silently like sunlight as the story takes hold, gradually revealing a radiating luminosity that made this reader, upon reaching the final page, long to begin the story all over again. Drenched with nostalgia that sets a tone that…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A pitch-perfect UK-based thriller with a pair of fabulous main characters, and a kickoff of a whole new series to boot. Written in 2019, this author and his work had previously somehow passed this reader by — a misstep that will now be quickly corrected. Dr Cyrus Haven is…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 For anyone who has ever considered their body, and judged it not “good”, without really stopping to wonder — Not good for what? Or whom? — this memoir, written by a woman who has explored that question, painfully and from birth, will definitely set your head spinning. Diagnosed with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ It is impossible to put into words (so ironic is that) how much this reader adored this little children’s picture book, — the tale of a boy named Oscar. The book is illustrated beautifully, with soft-palette images so gorgeous and charming any reader (of any age) would love to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A fascinating, meticulously-researched story starring both William Shakespeare, and a real-life sixteenth-century convicted murderess, Alice Arden. Told in alternating first-person voices of each of the main protagonists, the story oscillates between the timeline leading up to Alice’s involvement in the historical murder, which took place in 1551, and Shakespeare’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An easy read with a fast-paced plot and lots of intrigue. The perfect read for an afternoon lie-in during a blizzard (or any reading day at all). Megan - our first-person-POV narrator - is a twenty-eight-year old recent widow - an ethereal beauty with white-blonde hair and an aversion…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Edgy and raw, this is Book 4 in the Black Harbor series, and the first this reader has had the pleasure to read. Hazel Rydelle, our first-person POV narrator, is an ex-police-transcriber and and ex-occupant of Black Harbor, Milwaukee, — by her accounts a terrible place; black at heart;…