🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Gordon Slee is a bit of a loser. Or, at least, he thinks he is. Bullied and taken advantage of by his cretin of a boss, Edward Creaton, and terminally disappointing to his awful parents, Gordon is forty-two years old and has never managed to live up to his…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Six charming stories featuring my new favorite literary unsung hero, Ferdinand Fox (sure to be a favorite of your early reader too). Between these pages, Ferdinand is a busy fox — as he roams the countryside, he rescues a trapped boy, helps a box of kittens find a new…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A comprehensive, compassionate look at the specific challenges and approaches targeted to assist patients with early-onset cancer (diagnosed in one who is eighteen to forty-nine years old). As unbelievably challenging as a cancer diagnosis at any age is, the author, a clinical psychologist who has focused her practice exclusively…
🌟🌟🌟💫 A cozy mystery set in the rural Scottish Highlands, centering on the new owner of a bookstore, and her “Armchair Detectives” crime book club. Beth Cunningham is a thirty-four year old woman, newly released from the care of her ailing mother by the trauma of her death. Now the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Creepy, mind-blowing and terrifying, this is not your average horror novel. Far, far from it. Oceans, in fact, away from anything resembling the boundaries of the world we know. Buckle up, as between these pages, we will meet Glen, our third-person-POV narrator, a high school biology teacher who embarks…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A true story, based on the fascinating life story of Anna, a Norwegian woman, now seventy years old, who for decades has spent each spring-time tending to the nesting needs of eider ducks on the remote island of Fjærøy, off the coast of Norway, just south of the Arctic.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 The second book I have read from this author, each of which I have loved. “Needle Lake” is surprisingly tender, intensely atmospheric, and utterly compelling — with a main protagonist as heart-tuggingly authentic as an imagined character can possibly be. Based in a small town north of Seattle, Washington,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Filled with passion and angst, this is a book tailor-made for anyone who has ever aspired to write - or rather, to be a “writer” — a seemingly innocuous label that, for those in the literary “know”, carries an inordinate amount of weight. A label that can invoke literary…
A memoir and a somewhat complicated review — for a story beginning with horrific child abuse and leading to what will become a life-long adult search for healing — that could not help but raise all sorts of emotions in this reader. Empathy, pain and compassion. Curiosity and hope. Wonder,…