🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part memoir, and part historically accurate re-telling of a fatal and horrific bear attack on two campers in 1991, this is a difficult book to read, both for its emotional content and its blood-curdling recounting of the most nightmarish encounter with wildlife this reader could ever imagine. Made all…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Perhaps the strangest collection of short stories this reader has encountered, this is a hard book to categorize, but an easy book to love. Laugh-out-loud funny in places, often sardonic, absurd and always wildly inventive, these short stories contain some repeating characters and straddle situations, including those involving: inane…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 For anyone who has ever considered their body, and judged it not “good”, without really stopping to wonder — Not good for what? Or whom? — this memoir, written by a woman who has explored that question, painfully and from birth, will definitely set your head spinning. Diagnosed with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Absolute perfection, this is a book that simply could not be better. Best described as the comfortable puzzling of Agatha Christie meets the sweet, gentle protagonists of Alexander McCall Smith - but thicker, more immersive, with characters and imagery so evocative, layered, and expertly drafted you absolutely know these…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A read for my library book club, I found myself reading this gorgeous novel pretty much straight through. A story that sharply, without apology or sugar-coating, cuts through it all — our global predilection for NIMBY-ism, hate, and hypocrisy, underscored by generations of war and conquest — to lay…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A clever and compelling story with plenty of pathos and charm, refreshingly unlike anything this reader has encountered between the pages. The story is told through narratives alternating in the first-person voices of five people: a therapist, Genevieve Dempsey; and her four subjects: Freya, Victoria, Mischa, and Callum; each…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 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…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 For anyone who has experienced (make that, suffered) fat-shaming - the internalized mortification and inadequacy resulting from a life long barrage of society’s humiliations, disapproval, and disgust - this book may just be the very beginning of something transformative. “What I hated was less my body than the way…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Strange and beautiful, this engrossing tale cross-crosses time and space in the voice of two intimately-voiced first-person POV narrators. First we have Dr Henry Byrd, a psychiatrist with a traumatic past, who appears to have many secrets that may or may not intersect the world of his current patient…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A haunting, undulating look at the ebbs and flows of love, of aging, of loss - of ordinary life, made extraordinary, then settling back (over time, and pain, and anger and grief) into what is, after all, a life-story maybe live-able after all. Kathleen, one of our two main…