🌟🌟🌟 1/2 An interesting premise, - part competitive cozy-baking tv show, cleverly merged with an Agatha-Christie-like murder mystery. Like the characterizations it is based on, this book has a “folksy niceness”, a clean demarcation of the main players, (each with their idiosyncrasies, secrets, and struggles), and a twisty plot to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sometimes horrifying, always mesmerizing look at the power and the passion within - and what it may take to allow one to soar, wildly free of crippling expectations, fears, and the shameful inhibitions that bind us all. Alex, our first person POV narrator, is “something of a mess”.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “This was it, forever! Maybe!” Equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking, a memoir-like fictional rendering raising the question: Just how far is one Millennial willing to go towards (or away from) a newly adjusted life, uncoupled? Maggie, our first person POV narrator, is 28 yrs old, - a smartly sarcastic…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An engaging and suspenseful read, briskly-plotted and hard to put down, with an interesting pair of main protagonists and a clever ending that will not disappoint. Catherine and her mother Ruth are an odd duo - a mother-daughter couple where it often feels like roles are being switched, back…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…