🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A compassionate and heart-felt memoir, written by a retired forensic psychiatrist, whose thirty-two year career exposed her to more diversity, challenges, risks, and yes, opportunities, than many of us can even imagine. As a psychiatrist who works with mentally-ill criminals (and not dead bodies, as is a common misconception),…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ At just over six-hundred pages this is not a book for the faint of heart, but oh, please stick with it! This literary masterpiece is so meticulously plotted, so intricate, and so dense with living/breathing characters, evocative time periods and locations, and of course, thematic ideas and plot devices,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part murder-mystery, all character-based slow reveal, this story oozes sweetness and danger in a delectable unwind, a gradual pooling of cloying tension, fear, and poignant urgency as we are forced to question - what do we really know, after all, about those we cannot help but love? Set in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ A rapturous read, filled with human stories, memories, hopes, dreams and imaginings, and as in the plants so wondrously carried within, this is a book we gardeners (botanists, plant and nature-lovers) must all agree on. A treasure, “glossy and its flowers abundant”, - this book is pure goodness for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Based on the true-life story of two remarkable women, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, in the Kent township of Biddenden, in and around the early twelfth-century, this book takes the tale of what may be the first documented case of conjoined twins. In this case, joined at the hip, with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Quite likely the most uniquely-textured female heroine one is likely to meet between the pages, Dr Lily Robinson is a rare treat. A brilliant and beautiful pathologist and toxicologist, Dr Lily is one smart cookie - albeit one who is also deeply morally conflicted and suffering from a buried…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Lushly illustrative, in many ways, of the works set in motion by Rosamund Pilcher, this sweeping cross-generational family saga follows the lives and loves of two key women: Florence Baudin, a naive yet sensible young woman (dealing with a horrific past), and her long-estranged aunt, Rosalie Delacroix, a glamorous…