🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and endearing middle-grade story about love and longing, as seen from the POV of a sensitive bear, a motherly fox, and a competent but grumpy cat. Set in an imagined post-crisis New York City, the story teems with witches, and magic-competents - some good, and some as…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An emotionally gripping story, highlighting the debilitating trail cut by grief, loss, fear and self-shaming. Narrated in turn by Kyle McCray, a fortyish mechanic, now living in Spokane, Washington and his ex-wife, Casey, who remained behind two-and-a-half years ago in their home and hometown of Potsdam NY, Kyle’s losses…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A beautifully intricate story encompassing philosophical yearnings (fiercely compelling in their insight) for a pre-technological planet, and a multi-layered political agenda — all peppered with characters teeming with self-interest and corruption. Sadie Smith is an enigma. A seemingly heartless, perhaps even psychopathic, shadowy figure, “Sadie”, our first person POV…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 If living (vicariously) on a small island community, ensconced with colorful neighbors, your local pub, a whole lot of baking, tea, and of course, whiskey, calls out to you — consider now adding a spirited mystery, an intricate and engaging plot, and a cast of characters you will want…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 For anyone who has experienced (make that, suffered) fat-shaming - the internalized mortification and inadequacy resulting from a life long barrage of society’s humiliations, disapproval, and disgust - this book may just be the very beginning of something transformative. “What I hated was less my body than the way…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An emotional look at the complexities of sisterhood, mental illness, and the struggle to understand one’s role in supporting a damaged loved one. Amy Claire Shred is the sister of Olivia (Ollie), who is four years older. Living in the shadow of her beautiful, stubborn, impatient sister, Amy slowly…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An interesting premise, leading to an engaging plot, which is chock-full of well-drawn characters. It all begins with a seventy-ish lady, with nice silver hair, neatly dressed and not at all flashy. The kind of woman you might not notice. On this day, on a simple flight from Hobart,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Absurdly wonderful, this 1990s historical exploration focuses on our protagonist’s quest to understand language, love, and their relationship with meaning, in the wildly obscure wonderland of her freshman year at Harvard University. A heroine like no other, Selin Karadag, eighteen years old, is the tallest living member of her…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A bar-hopping, disco-dancing, beer-swilling nostalgic tale outlining the terrors and tribulations of growing up, finding one’s authentic self, and claiming a sexuality problematic in the 1970’s of one’s youth. It’s 1975, and Nicky DeMarco, our third person POV narrator, is an eighteen-year-old freshman, away from his Long Island family…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A haunting, undulating look at the ebbs and flows of love, of aging, of loss - of ordinary life, made extraordinary, then settling back (over time, and pain, and anger and grief) into what is, after all, a life-story maybe live-able after all. Kathleen, one of our two main…