🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A startlingly beautiful historical-fictionalized look at human life in an ancient time, which although easily seen as bleak, desperate and despotic, can also also be seen, (if one looks only a little deeper, and through the eyes of the wonderful characters depicted here), as hopeful, tender, brave and even…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A historical and cleverly-fictionalized look at the inner-life of a British Princess - Louise Caroline Alberta - born in 1848 as the sixth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (deceased when this story begins) - an accomplished sculptor, patron of the arts, and yes, champion of love and…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A beautiful and lyrical story, with an unusual writing style and more than a hint of magic and lore. Told mainly in the first-person voice of Samuel of Cologne, Sam’s story is augmented by the journals and letters of secondary narrators, criss-crossing back and forth in time to present…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ At just over six-hundred pages this is not a book for the faint of heart, but oh, please stick with it! This literary masterpiece is so meticulously plotted, so intricate, and so dense with living/breathing characters, evocative time periods and locations, and of course, thematic ideas and plot devices,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Based on the true-life story of two remarkable women, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, in the Kent township of Biddenden, in and around the early twelfth-century, this book takes the tale of what may be the first documented case of conjoined twins. In this case, joined at the hip, with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Lushly illustrative, in many ways, of the works set in motion by Rosamund Pilcher, this sweeping cross-generational family saga follows the lives and loves of two key women: Florence Baudin, a naive yet sensible young woman (dealing with a horrific past), and her long-estranged aunt, Rosalie Delacroix, a glamorous…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gothic triumph - drenched with atmosphere, and saturated with fascinating characters and dastardly deeds, contributing to an undercurrent of evil so thick you may find yourself as unable to stop shuddering as you are to stop reading. When Lieutenant Maxine Grant, just finishing up a maternity leave, must…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Like waves on an ocean, inexorable and relentless, this brilliant and devastating book washes over you, forcing an acknowledgement, a look squarely in the eye, of a time when the shattering abuse of First Nations parents, and their innocent and helpless children, was not only prevalent, but systemized as…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 A gut-wrenching and horrifying look at the atrocity of war, the insidiousness of intolerance, and the frailty of human life, this beautifully-written book is both a compassionate plea and a not-too-gentle reminder of the capriciousness of power. Told from the 3rd person POV perspective of three main protagonists,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2 An absolutely riveting ride, from start to finish. With its ominous pacing, vivid characterization, and alarmingly-charged plot, the author achieves an intensity of menace and foreboding that never lets up. Dealing with infamous events that took place, for the most part, in the year 1965, situated on and…
