Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl invited us to share ten bookish people we’d like to meet this week. I decided to tweak the topic just a bit and write about ten bookish people I’ve met at book signings and festivals. I haven’t been to many book events since the pandemic but before that, I was fortunate to attend quite […]
My goals for the year were to read 100 books and read less books than I did in 2021 (I have other projects I should be working on instead). I read 109 books in 2022, down from 180 in 2021 so I was successful with both goals! I’ve noted whether links go to my review; if I didn’t write one, the link goes to the Malaprop’s website […]
4 Stars. Once again, Ruta Sepetys has found a forgotten corner of history and written a gripping historical fiction novel about it. I’ve read a few books that touch on Germans at the end of WWII fleeing the vengeful Soviet army, but none of them were about Germans evacuating by boat. The history was fascinating and gut-wrenching […]
This train wreck of a year is finally ending and it’s time to post my top ten books of 2020! I revived my book blog in June so I haven’t written reviews for all of these. I’m leaving out books that I re-read and these obviously weren’t all published this year; I simply read them in 2020. Here we go […]
4 Stars. The Fountains of Silence does a wonderful job of presenting the dichotomy of the face that Spain presented to the world and the underlying darkness of the 1950s. Daniel is a wealthy Texas oil baron’s son staying in the American hotel that literally used to be a castle. By starting from his point of view, Sepetys begins with the […]
4.5 Stars. Oh my goodness. How did I not know about this? I’ve come across vague statements about how many millions of people died under Stalin’s regime in the past. I didn’t realize the scale of it, if that makes sense. I somehow thought it was smaller groups of “dissenters” killed across many, many years and across a vast […]