🌟🌟🌟🌟 A wonderful debut from a new author, which manages to be sweet, funny, and engaging, while also facing complex issues — grief, family obligations, less than useful coping mechanisms, and trauma — head on. Laced with a charming romance that is just beginning for long-time friends Simran and Leo,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This reader’s introduction to DS George Cross, in this, number four in the series featuring the detective, and his partner, DS Josie Ottey. A great new find, DS Cross is a detective unlike any other encountered. Neurodiverse (in this case, on the spectrum), Cross is detail-oriented, methodical, and totally…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An extremely well-executed thriller, with a unique premise and more than one puzzle to decipher, backwards! When Jen Brotherhood, a forty-something lawyer who cares too much for her clients, witnesses a horrific event, her life is flung upside down in a manner that absolutely could not be predicted. For…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A very mixed bag for this reader — first, the good (which is actually very good). This book starts with an interesting premise, featuring a detailed set of characters, each with their own POV, in a gorgeous island setting. The story is somewhat centered on a fascinating and horrifying…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A non-stop thriller which mixes Mexican drug cartel sheer and bloody terror with the incredible saga of a simple tequila-producing family, who grows from 1950’s Mexico to present day, along the way becoming a hugely successful, and absolutely dysfunctional, globally situated corporate dynasty, modeled with the moniker “RAM”. Peopled…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A searing and complex look at identity, sobriety, loneliness and longing — centering on the internal world of women, caretaking, motherhood, and the insidious push for disappearance into societal roles that, much as they may feel that way, do not ultimately define us. Between these pages we will follow…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A creepy and compelling peek into the not too distant future, where multiple acts of procreation (from those who can) are prioritized in a beat-up world struggling to preserve alarming population levels. Facing escalating climate pressures and mysterious viruses, (a world not too significantly unlike our own), our narrator,…
A complex and intensely moving look at love, at trauma, at illness and the lengths a person may go to in their ultimate quest for belonging. Hannah is a desperate young woman with a traumatic past, a business and film major, living in Toronto. A social outcast of sorts, Hannah…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ A strange and absolutely wonderful collection of short stories, unlike anything you are likely to ever read. These stories resonate, they sing, metaphorically, as they broach topics like crippling anxiety, the insecurities of motherhood, chronic illness and our destruction of the environment, all couched in stories of missing organs…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and heartfelt reminder that life is short, and the love of family and good friends a joy that must be captured, as quickly as it reveals itself. The fifth in the “Escape to the Lake” series by this wonderful and prolific author, I read this charming novel…