🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 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.…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A riveting and powerful read, this multilayered story winds and sweeps through the lives of characters that at first glance, almost appear to have it all. Almost, but not quite, as soon becomes apparent when a young girl is murdered, and it becomes likely that the seventeen-year-old children of…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A compassionate accounting of a complex and seemingly unsolvable problem, this book takes a fictionalized look at a real-life physician’s perspective of drug addiction, focusing on fentanyl, heroin and opiates, and the depths of despair such an addiction cannot help but reveal. As Dr Chen, who runs a Toronto-based…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A stylistic love-child of sorts, Joanna Trollope meets Marian Keyes, rich with vulnerable, mildly self-informed people, seeking a way forward in lives that feel filled with hardships. That aren’t necessarily so. If one could just shift perspective, ever so slightly. The story is written in the voice of Rachel…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 An engaging and suspenseful read, briskly-plotted and hard to put down, with an interesting pair of main protagonists and a clever ending that will not disappoint. Catherine and her mother Ruth are an odd duo - a mother-daughter couple where it often feels like roles are being switched, back…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A wildly imaginative ride through the past, and the present, and the silken threads that weave both together, featuring faeries, griffons, unicorns, giants and other creatures as strange and as wonderful as human dreams, hopes and imaginings are able to construct. Once there was a girl named Marjan Dastani,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟1/2 A cozy, crazy tapestry of lives and loves, heartfelt friends, caring onlookers and the others, the-not-so-kind, who are willing to cross the line to make their lives that little bit of better. Based in the Yorkshire town of Thirsk, and told in the the voices of three retired primary-school…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A heart-rending look at love (for others and mostly, for self) and survival, and the not-always-lucid path we may take in service of both. As this character-based narrative slowly reveals (gracefully and with pitch-perfect pacing), plagued with insecurities, unable to shed uniquely devastating pasts, emerging into the light comes…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A riveting, poignant, suspenseful look at the highs and the lows of love, marriage, and the opening of one’s heart, (as raw and vulnerable as it gets) to the dreams and dispositions of another. A particular other. (And what a difference that choice can make). Told in the first…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 A sly and clever mashup of perhaps the most dysfunctional family ever, a stylishly-plotted mystery, and a behind-the-scenes fantastical look at the audacious lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, all rolled into one addictively-suspenseful package that is sure to keep you reading. Alana is a thirty-something volunteer at a…