🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 An engrossing and immersive trip to an exotic South African safari-compound, — Leopard Sands — second-home to an uber-wealthy family from Florida, that is teeming with things that creep, stalk, and kill (and I don’t mean the wildlife). Family matriarch Odelia Bach is in her sixties, undoubtedly a narcissist,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A terrific all-around read — combining a mystery, a love story and a whole lot of historical intrigue — all wrapped up in a multiple-POV, multiple-timeframe narrative that makes for a unique and mesmerizing experience. Greta Schneider and her family are native East Germans, living in Berlin in 1982,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A well-written and engrossing read, with just enough twists to make it special. Sloane Caraway is a liar. At thirty-three years old, Sloane is not unattractive, but finds her own life (a nail technician who lives with her ailing mother) boring and not in the least exotic. And so,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 How much of our future is beholden to our pasts? The people we are — our perceptions, ideas, beliefs, and thoughts — how are they first developed, and then enacted, to create our eventual futures? This mind-numbing book examines all of this, and more, in a crazy, twisty, often…
A Massachusetts-based fairy-tale of sorts, about “witches” and magic and the enraptured heart - one that is able, in this story, to transcend time and space, following a path that is destined beyond earthly boundaries, - encapsulated in a journey that is written with beauty and great care. The story…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “As long as I could return to the library in my mind, I felt I could face whatever came." An engaging historical drama, beginning in 1918, opening the door on a little-known group of women, female volunteers with the American Committee for Devastated France (abbreviated as “CARDs”when translated from…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A haunting saga about growing up different, disconnected and isolated, and the winding journey a life can take in its journey through to rootedness. Diamond, our first-person POV narrator, is a uniquely authentic voice. A young black girl whose narrative age varies from nine or so to sixteen, as…
The story of Daisy Shoemaker, who ranges in age from fifteen, at the start of the story, to her coming-of-age at twenty-one. Daisy is a fictional character, based on historically accurate research on the appalling lives of girls and women in fundamentalist Mormon polygamist (FLDS) sects as existed in the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A memoir packed with heartrending revelations, damning the instigator and obfuscating the author’s grief over the sudden death of her husband, Sean, at the young age of forty seven. For Sean was, in fact, a bastard. A terrible one - being both a liar and a cheat and hiding…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A clever and turbulent story, paced largely by: an achingly slow character-driven build; a plot-driven puzzle that surfaces early, is tweaked and dangled and kept alive with tiny tantalizingly hidden clues (very much solvable, if the reader sticks with it); and a supremely chaotic, crazily consistent ending. Our story…