[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Packed with sardonic humor (Note to reader: watch where you read this book. I found myself laughing out loud in several places) pop culture (many of which were obscure to this reader), faux fur, and pink velvet, this ode to growing up a literary-wannabe in the exploding…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Beautifully textured, this mind-altering speculative fiction story tells a tale of time, of humanity, and our never-ending search for meaning and understanding, amidst our existential quest to live a “tranquil life in the face of death”. With impeccable finesse the author builds an intricate and mesmerizing world…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 I adore this series. Having followed (and loved) the work of this brilliant and prolific author for decades, it is this series in particular - Isabel Dalhousie, her essential “goodness”, and her gorgeously-welcoming literary world - that has earned a very special place in my heart. An…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A continuation of the Detective Moralès series, this was my introduction to this author, and easily enjoyed as a stand-alone novel. Part dread, part horror, and all suspense, this is a brilliantly crafted story with an atmosphere so darkly charged with foreboding, that this reader, for one,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 This beautiful cook-book is a labor-of love between two authors, both of Chinese heritage and heavily influenced by a love of the food and flavors of their roots - one, Rosheen Kaul , (of Kashmiri and Chinese/Filipino descent), a head chef; and the other, Joanna Hu, experienced…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 How would you handle it - in the blink of an eye, your entire world turned upside down? Not once, in fact, but actually, twice - first, the overwhelming (and somewhat expected) devastation driven by grief-stricken loss, followed by a revelation, hidden and spectacularly unsuspected for decades,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 “Sports and war are two of the world’s greatest equalizers”. A Canadian author/teacher’s exhaustively and beautifully-researched treatise into the history of sport, focusing on the systemic racially-abusive treatment of black, indigenous and other marginalized communities (including Japanese-Canadians) from the earliest days of organized amateur and professional leagues,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.” What is play, or gaming, but “the possibility of a different world”? “The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.” An epic of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As much a sweet and immersive love-story as it is a cracking-good small(ish)-town detective story, this book got under my skin and into my heart in a way that was totally unexpected. Ben Ames, our first-person POV narrator, is an ex-cop, now running a one-man PI agency…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “And that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.” A gloriously uplifting fairy-tale of sorts, helping us consider the wonder of, not “happily ever after”, but its infinitely richer cousin - the power and promise of the ethereally beautiful “hopefully ever after” -…