🌟🌟🌟💫 Based in and around Portland, Oregon, this legal thriller is peppered with several plot twists, a central and darkly terrible crime, a bevy of suspicious characters, and a long and circuitous road that may or may not lead to justice. Charlie Webb is an average guy, and an equally…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Unusual and gripping, this made-for-teens story is the start of a new series by one of my favorite (adult mystery) authors. In this new genre, we meet Hannah Armstrong, a strangely-gifted fourteen-year-old, who has the ability to hear other’s thoughts, in the form of “whispers”, which are often chaotically…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Both an examination of the intensity of the trials of new motherhood, and a Martha-Vineyards-based mystery, this book only partially scores on both fronts. Brynn Nelson, our third person POV (and somewhat unreliable) narrator, is in her early thirties, and has not quite felt like herself since the birth…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An extremely well-executed thriller, riveting in parts, with a shocker of an ending this reader absolutely did not see coming. The story is told in two timelines: the first occurring in 1998 when a trio of girls, students at Southern State University in North Carolina, go missing. Our first…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A stunning collection of short stories, told across decades and spanning New Zealand and Canada, each centering on one of a small group of loosely-connected women that have crossed paths, although their stories are told here individually. With incredible fineness the author slices through these literary lives, each story…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A raw and powerful memoir, a story of a life lived with trauma, written by an author who is very well known for her fiction, and who cannot resist playing a trick or two on the reader, beginning with her identification as a perhaps inevitably “unreliable” narrator. The author’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Like a giant ball of fluffy wool, this absolutely delightful read will tangle you up completely, so sweetly snug you will want to stay more than a while. Written to take place over a three-day period, this book is narrated in the first-person voice of Gail Baines, a sixty-one…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Wow. Layered with so many velvety bands of literary texture and nuance, this is an absorbing, mesmerizing, haunting read, leading the reader deep into the hidden lives of two families, — the stories untold, the fears blindly enacted, the words not spoken but festering, for years, and even decades,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and endearing middle-grade story about love and longing, as seen from the POV of a sensitive bear, a motherly fox, and a competent but grumpy cat. Set in an imagined post-crisis New York City, the story teems with witches, and magic-competents - some good, and some as…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A beautifully intricate story encompassing philosophical yearnings (fiercely compelling in their insight) for a pre-technological planet, and a multi-layered political agenda — all peppered with characters teeming with self-interest and corruption. Sadie Smith is an enigma. A seemingly heartless, perhaps even psychopathic, shadowy figure, “Sadie”, our first person POV…