🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A fascinating behind-closed-doors look at the true-life experiences of an elementary school principal, based in Southern Ontario, Canada, and serving a student body of approximately 600 sometimes overwhelmingly-needy students. An instructional leadership champion, longing to support widespread changes in teaching practices that will facilitate critical thinking, interactive learning, and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A somewhat bittersweet look at love and abandonment, and the long and twisty road, perhaps unreachable after all, that one must follow to heal. Katerina (Kat) is a thirty-seven year old former journalist, now Manager of a bookshop/cafe in a particularly lovely area of France, -Strasbourg, on the eastern…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A harrowing inside-look at a horrifying pandemic - Ebola in Western Africa in the years 2014 to 2016 - written by a front-line OB-Gyn, doing his part to treat maternity referrals as the world around him dissolves into the chaos of a new emergency. “In the war we knew…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A complex story of secrets, a memoir spanning decades of searching, as the author, her two siblings and her parents, (each of them, separately and in their own anguished way) navigate a world shrouded in visceral pain and uncertainty - just who, exactly, are they, deep inside - who…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A deeply moving exploration of what it feels like to be a former expert medical practitioner - a neuroscientist (now retired), long-versed in the practice of guiding others “through the landscape of illness” - now facing his own terrifying and potentially-terminal illness. In this work, the author, Dr Henry…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Lewis Madigan is, or rather, was, a twenty-four year old software developer. Now Lewis, unemployed and desperate, has the dubious task of caring for Chester Wheeler, his terminally-ill and decidedly unpleasant next-door-neighbor. Chester is homophobic, mean-spirited and totally dependent on external care - a situation made all the more…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ With a main protagonist calling to mind apple pie and sunshine, (still at that difficult stage, but at his essence, a gentle optimist, so clearly packaged up with love), a plot oozing with the bittersweet essence of interminably-awkward high-school ardor, and a backdrop of equal parts excruciating and heart-melting…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 💫 Heartwarming and cozy, like cocoa before a warm fire, this book explores the random thoughts and musings expressed by a group of actors, creatives, writers, directors and artists, (most of them with only a personal, and not professional, involvement with food) when asked to create an essay for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 From the very start I have loved Louise Penny’s books, having read every one of them, with the joy and eagerness that comes with revisiting a special world, populated with old friends, beginning with Armand Gamache and extending to (almost) every single character who resides in Three Pines (I…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An interesting character-based crime story - more a meandering, engaging, mystery-rich novel rather than a more typical police procedural, this book also serves to introduce DC Gabrielle Darin in the first of a series featuring Gaby and her Wales-based detective team. The story of Izzy, a twenty-something, pretty but…