[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 An absolutely riveting ride, from start to finish. With its ominous pacing, vivid characterization, and alarmingly-charged plot, the author achieves an intensity of menace and foreboding that never lets up. Dealing with infamous events that took place, for the most part, in the year 1965, situated…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 A nail-biter of a read, this story’s emotional wallop, sparked from the very first (of many) explosive twists, is destined to keep the reader entirely on edge, right up to the intense and ultimately satisfying finale. Written in a taut, spare and vivid style, the author captures…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Haunting and unsettling, this chapbook of profoundly beautiful poems captured my heart. With many written in a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness style, the author (poet) blends vivid imagery plucked from the natural world, (almost hallucinogenic in the brightness of its metaphorical flow), with the poignant and evocative musings of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ This may very well be my favorite children’s picture-book ever! A composite of absolutely adorable watercolor pictures, (each edged in ink and portraying a different child with their cuddly pet), this story is so sweetly evocative that you’ll find yourself reluctant to leave this author (who is…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A masterpiece of emotional artistry, as spectacularly tender as it is disquieting, this book will stay with you long after you finish it. Heather and Harriet, six and nine years old respectively, are two little girls who have a special bond. As sisters, the love they share…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ Myths and Fairy Tales. Consciousness. Escape. Redemption. Pathos. Eccentricity. Assimilation. A wildly beautiful book, this literary masterpiece - reminiscent in spirit and some thematic elements of the also-magnificent Kazuo Ishiguro- is both heartbreakingly tender and intensely thoughtful. While the reader can’t stop thinking about the momentousness of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟1/2 Intricate, tightly-plotted mystery yarn with plenty of twists, red herrings, and deliberate misfires guaranteed to keep you shaking your head and guessing. The first in the “Midlands Crime” series, set in and around Worcestershire, Birmingham and Warwickshire, centering on a crime-fighting squad known as “Heart of England”…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 Richly immersive and entirely disturbing, this beautifully written book is destined to fascinate as much as it will horrify readers as unfamiliar up-close with this subject matter and historical time-period, as was this reader. Set in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, in the year AD…
Food That Tastes Like Home [responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 In this beautifully illustrated homage to his Korean-American roots, food writer and columnist Eric Kim leads us through a delightful tour of Korean cooking covering all the bases - from quick and easy TV Dinners, to Pantry Meals, Stews, Rice (the bedrock…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ How to describe a book that alternately, makes you laugh out loud, cringe at the no-holds-barred misogyny of the fifties, grieve and ache (when your heart’s not soaring with delighted wonder), and throughout it all, cheer with wild abandon for the main protagonist Elizabeth Zott (a mother,…