🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ “All I wanted was for you to see me” How to capture the joy of reading this, this collection of more than two dozen tiny perfect literary gems? Each story distinct, but at its heart, this is a cohesive collection - tearing through layers of yearning and isolation, revealing…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 When Big Bear has to leave on a trip, it’s clear that being apart from Little Bear could be hard on them both. Faced with that situation, this sweet and loving book shows us solace, in all its many forms. Little Bear learns that his interactions with the world…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A wonderful, brilliantly-written, and wildly eclectic collection of ghost-themed short stories, from one of my favorite authors, interspersed with several ghostly introspections based on her own real life experiences. The stories run the gamut from spine-tingling and sinister, to heartbreaking and grieving, all the way to downright reflective and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This candid and beautifully written memoir is a heartbreaking look at family, sisters in particular, and the healing we can and cannot do. As Kelly, an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, comes to terms with her relationship with her maddening, often dishonest and drug-addicted sister, Meghan, it’s not…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Moody and evocative, this book is the very essence of a slow burn, best described, in the author’s own words, as a tantalizingly “slow simmer”, bubbling and congealing, before “morphing into a full-blown boil”. Margot, our first person POV, is a strange and disturbingly-repressed narrator. Revealing little, and concealing…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautifully-written, heartbreakingly twisty tale of star-crossed lovers, who may in fact, now get a second chance to be together, almost forty years after their original romance. Sarah Carson Blackwell is sixty-ish, divorced, with two grown children, and is long used to living alone. (Note: well, not quite alone,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Imaginative and intricate, this sci-fi thriller blends a near-future world of inventive hi-tech gadgets and norms (fantastical, but perhaps only barely), with a thoughtful commentary on engineered procreation - in this case labeled “precision reproduction” - and its affect on the fragile identities of the generations of these humans…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Otto is a lonely otter - one who is too shy and timid to join in with the other otters at play time in the water, and who is not feeling loved. With Valentines Day approaching, Otto knows he will be alone again, on the outside and watching everyone…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A claustrophobic thriller set in a fascinating location - aboard an expedition cruise set for the icy splendor of Antarctica. In this case, before the ship has even set sail, sinister and unexplained happenings are afoot. When a man is kidnapped enroute to boarding for the soon-to-depart cruise, it…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 I do so love a good gothic novel. All the elements are here, at this author’s hands, building into a hauntingly mesmerizing read that hits all the right notes, keeping this reader thoroughly hooked, - right up to an ending not unpredictable but so perfectly fitting it appears to…