🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A deep dive into the sublime and the unpleasant, the pretense of living large, and the sheer awfulness that may be hidden, under deceptively ‘normal’ exteriors. Each of the four main protagonists in this story, women all, three of them fortyish and one an octogenarian, have secrets to hide.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An absorbing and atmospheric tale of grief and loss, intermingled with both shame and blame, and the devastation wrought in its aftermath. Kieran, our third person POV narrator, is thirty years old, the father of a baby with his loving partner Mia. As Kieran and Mia pay a visit…
🌟🌟🌟💫 With flashes of the brilliance that have come to be expected from this author, one of my very favorites, this book also was weighed far too heavily down with an overly complex plot, too many unnecessary and loosely connected tangents, and an emphasis on visual references to the dark…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Another top-notch read from one of my favorite authors, this one a delicious slow burn with main protagonists, Cal and Trey, who are both so beautifully rendered you will find yourself leaving the final pages aching to meet them again in a sequel. Nobody writes like Tana French, an…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gentle, haunting look at love and compassion, with all their dips and valleys and unexpected meanderings, amidst the steady and inescapable pull of time. When Beatrix, an eleven-year-old Londoner, becomes an evacuee to America during the bombings of WWII, her life takes on an entirely new tone. Sent…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 Picture this. A sci-fi series, beginning with this novella, based upon an achingly vulnerable half-human bot, or is that half-bot human? Hard to say as this fascinating character has feelings (which he hates and tries to ignore), can and will hack his own programming, and may or may not…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A fascinating and spell-binding look at one man’s odyssey to understand and alleviate the terrible disease that is MS. We meet the author initially as a child, following him through his early exposure to a devastating neurological medical mystery within his own family, that starts him down the path…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A darkly twisted tale that sets such a creepy tone that I swear I found myself reading this one with one eye closed - prepared to close both if and when the story warranted. And although butting up against the very edge, (my triggers are child and animal abuse,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A slowly building story, haunting in its evocative treatment of life on the island of Newfoundland of the 90’s, as seen through the eyes of the twelve-year old son in a multigenerational fishing family. Set in one long and poignant summer in 1991, Pierce, our first person POV narrator,…
🌟🌟🌟💫 An emotionally complex story that weaves between two female protagonists in two timeframes, and the dual locations of London, England, and Montreux, Switzerland. Jess - a first-person POV voice, is a thirty-nine year old teacher who tells her story in a current day timeline. With her divorce looming, and…