🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gorgeous, life-affirming picture book, targeted for three to seven year olds, about curiosity, and wonder, and keeping our head high, up in the clouds, where it belongs. The story centers on the littlest crow, who does not understand her elders fear and the smallness it makes of their…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A stylish and engrossing thriller, this terrific murder mystery hits all the right notes, starting with a premise that is both tantalizing and original. We all know that murderers’ lives have been commercialized, sensationalized and documented far more thoroughly than the lives of their victims. But what of murderer’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A collection of twelve short stories, each a perfect encapsulation of literary characters stood up living and breathing, with seemingly effortless grace, and the space of a mere few pages. In each case, young and old, and brimming with dry humor, the reader is invited in to share lives…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 What makes a ‘good’ day for a dysfunctional family? A family made so, in large part, due to unresolved trauma, seeping over time into life-altering mental illness. Betty and Greg Laramie made absolutely terrible parents, eventually forcing them to give up their daughter, Charlie, to foster care. With Betty…
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick — aka “Mad Mabel” — is eighty-one years old. A tough-talking (tender-hearted?) and deeply humorous octogenarian, six-feet tall with broad shoulders, Mabel puts up with nothing from any-one, least of all the mousy neighborhood child Persephone, or her much-lamented nemesis, the ninety-three year old Ishaan and his…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Absorbing and masterful psychological suspense, this top-notch thriller is intermingled with thoughtful social commentary on aging, grief, loneliness, and mental clarity — and how hard it is really separate those concepts. Linda Davidson, our first person POV narrator, is seventy-six years old, recently widowed, and living in the retirement…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Absolutely not your typical memoir — but then again, Sue Aikens is not your typical human. The narrative covers Sue’s tragic beginnings as a young girl, abused and unloved; to her mentors, loves, and children as her family life evolves; all the way to her eventual settlement on her…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Breezy and candid, intimate and expansive, this memoir, by non-fiction writer Susan Orlean, refuses to be typecast. The author, an expert in the art of a quirky sort of storytelling, featuring uniquely interesting real-life characters, places or topics, each of which is are not quite what you’re expecting, will…