🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 How much of our future is beholden to our pasts? The people we are — our perceptions, ideas, beliefs, and thoughts — how are they first developed, and then enacted, to create our eventual futures? This mind-numbing book examines all of this, and more, in a crazy, twisty, often…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 "This is what happens to women" A truly terrifying read, this modern-day, feminist-inspired take on Stoker’s Dracula is creepy, compelling, and absolutely the stuff that nightmares are made of. Heavily informed by Welsh folklore, this take has the centuries old ‘Sugnwr Gwaed’, the ‘Fampir”, lurking in his windswept Castle,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A mesmerizing Nordic mystery, uniquely premised, cleverly plotted, and impossible to put down. Agnes Glin, our third-person-POV narrator, is twenty-seven years old and has lived her entire life in California, although her heritage on her father’s side is Icelandic. Agnes, with her white-blond hair, is still reeling from a…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A lushly intricate tale of love, and longing, and most of all, of lies — and what it will take to smooth out edges, creased and sharpened and soiled, by years (make that decades) of deceit. Narrated in the alternating third-person voices of three main protagonists, the story arcs…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Unusual and gripping, this made-for-teens story is the start of a new series by one of my favorite (adult mystery) authors. In this new genre, we meet Hannah Armstrong, a strangely-gifted fourteen-year-old, who has the ability to hear other’s thoughts, in the form of “whispers”, which are often chaotically…
🌟🌟🌟💫 Both an examination of the intensity of the trials of new motherhood, and a Martha-Vineyards-based mystery, this book only partially scores on both fronts. Brynn Nelson, our third person POV (and somewhat unreliable) narrator, is in her early thirties, and has not quite felt like herself since the birth…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 An extremely well-executed thriller, riveting in parts, with a shocker of an ending this reader absolutely did not see coming. The story is told in two timelines: the first occurring in 1998 when a trio of girls, students at Southern State University in North Carolina, go missing. Our first…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A raw and powerful memoir, a story of a life lived with trauma, written by an author who is very well known for her fiction, and who cannot resist playing a trick or two on the reader, beginning with her identification as a perhaps inevitably “unreliable” narrator. The author’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Like a giant ball of fluffy wool, this absolutely delightful read will tangle you up completely, so sweetly snug you will want to stay more than a while. Written to take place over a three-day period, this book is narrated in the first-person voice of Gail Baines, a sixty-one…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…