2.5 Stars. I’m not really the audience for this book but I wanted a Christmas-y audiobook and it was either this standalone romance or other romances or cozy mysteries that were roughly number 52 in a series. (Yes, that’s an exaggeration but not as much as it should be.) Standalone romance it was, even though I’m not really a […]
Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston: Book Review
These books! I keep saying this but I grin until my face hurts while I’m reading them! Even when the story takes a troubled turn, I smile in anticipation of the eventual Happily Ever After…
Save the Date by Mary Kay Andrews: Book Review
I really, really want to give Save the Date four stars, and I would have, but somewhere about halfway through I got fed up with Cara. Up to that point, she’d been such a little fighter that I’d been rooting for her all along. And sure, she has a lot on her plate, but then she goes looking for–and creates!–trouble where none […]
The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly: Book Review
3 Stars. I’m so torn. I adore A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. Like, top-five-books-ever adore it. So I know she can write. But this is her debut novel and it shows. It also got laughably melodramatic. There’s a better word to describe this book but it’s escaping me. Dickensian? Maybe. Fiona’s tragedies just pile one on […]
The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig: Book Review
4 Stars. Oh my. I did not ever, in my wildest dreams, expect a book about Miss Gwen! What a hoot! Somehow, I’d decided that she was at least 70. She’s actually only about 45. And an attractive 45 at that, if you can get past the fierce way she wields her parasol in defense of Jane’s virtue. I’m so glad she got her own story […]
How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer: Book Review
Okay, this was weird. But it was a weird that I liked. Astronomer Irene Sparks decides to move back to Toledo on the day that she almost simultaneously creates a mini black hole in her lab and learns that her alcoholic mother has died. She’s always wanted to go back home and work for the Continue Reading…
Habibi by Craig Thompson: Book Review
I don’t even really know what I read here, but I do know that liked it. Part love story, part coming-of-age novel, part environmental warning, Habibi covers a lot of ground. Dodola and Zam meet as children when they’re up for sale in a slave market in what appears to be the Middle East. Events Continue Reading…
Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier: Book Review
Caitrin is on the run from a bad situation at home. With only the clothes on her back, a few coins, and her box of scribing tools, she just wants to get away. Her money runs out late one evening in the middle of nowhere. She finds her way to a village called Whistling Tor. Continue Reading…
The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene: Book Review
Claire Harris is a New York socialite, throwing extravagant parties and softening up her husband’s potential business partners for him. Her past comes back to haunt her one night and she flees to Paris on the eve on the German occupation to find an old lover. Their reunion doesn’t go well and she finds herself Continue Reading…
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George: Book Review
Jean Perdu is a broken man, not really living his life but only existing. His one great love left him twenty years ago and he’s never moved on. He puts together gigantic puzzles in his spartan apartment and sells books on his book barge, The Literary Apothecary. He knows exactly the right book to sell Continue Reading…
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker: Book Review
Tin Win is a successful lawyer who simply walks out of his life one day. His children have both graduated from college so he apparently has decided that he’s a free man. There’s a search but it quickly comes to a dead end in Bangkok. His daughter Julia decides several years later to go looking Continue Reading…