🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Endlessly fascinating, this treasure trove of wisdom easily takes the place as my absolute favorite non-fiction read of 2024 (and likely beyond). Written by a retired academic, the author’s quest for answers sees him following connections crossing over into so many fields the result is a veritable cornucopia of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An ambitious and interesting novel, with a unique premise and a narrative voice totally unlike any other. Eddie Asher, a startlingly handsome bi-racial man and our third-person POV narrator, was adopted as an infant by a white family, granting Eddie loving parents, and an older brother, Robert, that he…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 How much of our future is beholden to our pasts? The people we are — our perceptions, ideas, beliefs, and thoughts — how are they first developed, and then enacted, to create our eventual futures? This mind-numbing book examines all of this, and more, in a crazy, twisty, often…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Turning the final page on this literary memoir I find my head spinning, mind struggling to form an articulate, coherent summary beyond an overwhelming and incontrovertible — Wow. So here we are - my own “fusion” of somewhat disconnected (utterly blown-away) impressions underlying this incredible work. First, with sheer…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Book four in the Margaret Nolan series, my first by this author, (but definitely not my last) — this is a complex, well-drafted police procedural packed with likable and interesting recurring characters, all revolving around a multi-layered plot, itself teeming with action, twists, plenty of bad-guys, and of course,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 "This is what happens to women" A truly terrifying read, this modern-day, feminist-inspired take on Stoker’s Dracula is creepy, compelling, and absolutely the stuff that nightmares are made of. Heavily informed by Welsh folklore, this take has the centuries old ‘Sugnwr Gwaed’, the ‘Fampir”, lurking in his windswept Castle,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A clever and compelling story with plenty of pathos and charm, refreshingly unlike anything this reader has encountered between the pages. The story is told through narratives alternating in the first-person voices of five people: a therapist, Genevieve Dempsey; and her four subjects: Freya, Victoria, Mischa, and Callum; each…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A mesmerizing Nordic mystery, uniquely premised, cleverly plotted, and impossible to put down. Agnes Glin, our third-person-POV narrator, is twenty-seven years old and has lived her entire life in California, although her heritage on her father’s side is Icelandic. Agnes, with her white-blond hair, is still reeling from a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A lushly intricate tale of love, and longing, and most of all, of lies — and what it will take to smooth out edges, creased and sharpened and soiled, by years (make that decades) of deceit. Narrated in the alternating third-person voices of three main protagonists, the story arcs…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ I listened to the (excellent) audio version of this memoir, narrated by Julia Roberts and Riley Keough, and interspersed with audio clips from Lisa Marie Presley that she recorded as part of her book preparations. Lisa Marie, having reached out to her daughter, Riley, for help in pulling the…