[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟💫 An Interesting and suspenseful premise, executed with the help of a crazily complex web of strange and compelling characters (most of them harboring deception and secrets), and an intensely creepy setting, this book’s initially engaging start fell somewhat flat for this reader on the final go-round. Hannah,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A fascinating, multi-layered look at the “hard” problem of consciousness, which this reader found totally and absolutely mesmerizing. (My own consciousness working hard to keep up, expanding with the extraordinarily-sweeping insights of this author). Taking an unusual approach, the author, a neuroscientist, considers one true-to-life scenario -…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Beautifully textured, this mind-altering speculative fiction story tells a tale of time, of humanity, and our never-ending search for meaning and understanding, amidst our existential quest to live a “tranquil life in the face of death”. With impeccable finesse the author builds an intricate and mesmerizing world…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 I adore this series. Having followed (and loved) the work of this brilliant and prolific author for decades, it is this series in particular - Isabel Dalhousie, her essential “goodness”, and her gorgeously-welcoming literary world - that has earned a very special place in my heart. An…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.” What is play, or gaming, but “the possibility of a different world”? “The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.” An epic of…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Shockingly-twisty, tense and engrossing, this character-driven thriller veers between two equally-fascinating and fractured worlds. Marisa Grover, twenty-eight-years old, caramel-blonde and an illustrator of children’s fairy tales, is a damaged woman. Abandoned at a young age by her mother, Marissa ‘s short life thus far has her feeling…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dazzling and beautiful as it is thoughtful and heart-wrenching, this speculative fiction narrative centers on the indescribable pain and beauty of motherhood, and the mysterious and horrifying related “affliction” one small and isolated community has found themselves subject to. Somehow, some way, this unnamed town has…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 If you can’t beat em, join em? A NY-based secret society of powerful women, helping each other through influence-peddling and a whole lot more - modeled on the corrupt and seedy old-boys-club networks that have crisis-crossed the social, political and economic landscape of movers and shakers dominating…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Here again, as we’ve seen before, Ann Cleeves, one of my all time favorite authors, writes like no other, in this, Book 9 of the wonderful Vera Stanhope series. In this story we meet Lorna Falstone, a beautiful…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 As dependable a treat as the coldest, sweetest, ice-cream on a summer day, any book by Ann Cleeves, including this hot-off-the-press installment (#10) in the glorious #Vera series, will not disappoint. Vera, back with all the brash, brave, headstrong (and unabashedly offensively-leaning) determination she brings to any…