⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Prepare to meet Dani Truehart, a fifteen year old “Rising Star” who just wants to sing and dance and feel the music carry her to a higher place. It’s what she was meant to do. If it all just wasn’t so complicated. Dani is a well-crafted, authentic…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] What happens when an erudite, bookish, somewhat naive young man of twenty-two hailing from NYC decides to “escape leading the life expected of him and winds up leading a life he had never expected for himself” ? Our narrator is an unidentified individual who is telling…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Chillingly prescient, insightfully nuanced and disturbingly evocative, this historical epic, based in New Orleans, follows the turbulence that rocked the state of Louisiana in the years following the Confederate loss of the Civil War. The second in a historical series from this author featuring Emmett Collins, I…
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Set in the early days of WW1 in Merseyside, Lancashire, this story follows the journey of Anna and Ellie, two young female nurses, who long to do their part to help in the war effort. It’s a grim and difficult period for those left behind -…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] With a story-telling style (and hints of magic) reminiscent of Ray Bradbury, and populated by darkly flat-affect characters straight out of Patricia Highsmith, this set of short stories is interesting, unusual and intriguingly compelling. Each of the stories features a story spun around a main protagonist…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] With an interesting (and very socially intermingled) cast of police characters, this Scottish crime book, the first of the new DC Jane Renwick series, is off to an intriguing start. Part procedural police mystery, and part what-do-police-officers-do-in-their-social-lives, this story begins with a emotional wallop and the psychological…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] “You give up traditions at your peril. One day you’ll look back and not remember who you are.” Imagine it’s 1909, and you, a Jewish teen accompanied by your family, survivors of the Russian revolution at a terrible cost, land in NYC to begin a new life.…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] What happens when a life-time of learned defenses suddenly stop working? This is a story about revenge, misogyny, rage and the sort of evil that keeps you awake at night. But at the heart of it, this is really a story about love. About guilt. And…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Inspired by true events beginning in 1944, and populated with characters who are composites of real-life heroes and villains, this meticulously researched and wonderfully evocative novel is WWII at its most chilling. With WWII instead of the Cold War fueling the fear and desperation-driven machinery of…
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] Spellbinding. Poignant. Inspirational. Brimming with the naturalism of Barbara Kingsolver and the authenticity of Anne Tyler, this book reached and filled a Covid-fueled paucity I wasn’t fully aware of. “What was there to be afraid of in this place where everything was as you saw it -…