🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part memoir, and part historically accurate re-telling of a fatal and horrific bear attack on two campers in 1991, this is a difficult book to read, both for its emotional content and its blood-curdling recounting of the most nightmarish encounter with wildlife this reader could ever imagine. Made all…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Wowza! A perfectly crafted multiple-POV psychological suspense story, rich with sizzling characters (all of them hiding something) and a setting as lip-smackingly luscious as it is creepy and sinister. With a plot that builds, and winds, and re-winds, gleefully delighting in tricking the reader, several times, into what feels…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gorgeous, mesmerizing read with a stop-the-clock ending, that you may just find yourself dreaming about, the next time you hear a bird sing outside your window (your very own soul-stirring spark bird). Simon, our third person POV narrator is a thirty-year-old musician, who has never quite managed to…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Perhaps the strangest collection of short stories this reader has encountered, this is a hard book to categorize, but an easy book to love. Laugh-out-loud funny in places, often sardonic, absurd and always wildly inventive, these short stories contain some repeating characters and straddle situations, including those involving: inane…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A beautiful and generous memoir, written by a professor of Philosophy who has experienced more pain, quite likely, than most of us, and has acted on her inclination and thoughtfulness to share her learnings with us. Chloe, from birth, suffers from a disorder related to disruptions in the development…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A book that defies black-and-white categorization — filled with fantasy, folklore, magic and fairies, —but if “delightful” was a book genre, “Greenteeth” would be top of its class. Charming, humorous, and imaginative — this is the story of Jenny Greenteeth, who is not technically a “hag” but is a…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A story which has received a number of wonderful reviews, this book ended up not totally hitting the mark for this reader (who may be in the minority here). Julia, the main protagonist and third person POV narrator, begins our tale as a psychologist, working as an executive for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A terrific all-around read — combining a mystery, a love story and a whole lot of historical intrigue — all wrapped up in a multiple-POV, multiple-timeframe narrative that makes for a unique and mesmerizing experience. Greta Schneider and her family are native East Germans, living in Berlin in 1982,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Jenny Finney Boylen, a self-proclaimed bookish, goofy (outwardly male) college professor, knew from an early age that she was a girl inside — a transgender path she did not follow until she reached her forties. Exactly how that journey unfolded, the changes encountered and the spaces left unfilled cannot…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Little gems of perfection, each of the ten short stories from this collection published in 1990 will sneak up on you, emotionally, letting the reader deep into a life (and its gossamy spiderweb of related lives) for one brief and startling instant. Each a length of ten or twenty…