An alphabetical list of all of Carmen’s reviews. For a specific title, please use our search feature. Enjoy!
Medusa’s Sisters by Lauren J.A. Bear
My Take: I am on a Greek gods kick since listening to Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles". Thank goodness, there is no lack of Greek god novels out there! I saw Medusa's Sisters on the "available" shelf of audiobooks online, and was immediately excited! My take:...
Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My Take: I was SO INVESTED in this story! I loved Carrie, Gwen, Javier, and Bowe. I was rooting for Carrie during every match. I was hella worried about Javier's health. I was hoping that Gwen wouldn't drop Carrie. And I was hoping that Bowe would be patient enough to...
Stop Everything!: Episode 99
In this episode, Carmen and Rachel talk about titles someone has told us to “Stop Everything and read!”, and how they turned out. Let us know if you’ve ever been faced with a “stop everything” book, and how it turned out for you. And remember, the acronym for “drop...
Banned Book Spotlight: Maus Episode 97
In this episode, Carmen and Rachel talk about the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman called, “Maus”. We have talked about Maus before, but we have never dedicated an entire episode to one title. First a little background. Maus is written and illustrated by a cartoonist...
Best of – Episode 44 – Horror
In this episode, Carmen will be doing most of the talking, and Rachel will be making comments, on various titles from the horror genre. Let us know which book scared you the most. And remember, “Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense....
Best Of – Holiday Edition Day 13
Carmen and Rachel wish you the merriest of the season. As you do, please enjoy some of our best episodes from last year. Today has us listening to Episode 41: Why the F*%$ is THAT on my Shelf?
Best Of – Holiday Edition Day 6
Carmen and Rachel wish you the merriest of the season. As you do, please enjoy some of our best episodes from last year. Day 6 has us listening to Episode 26 - 2021 Reading Challenges.
Best Of – Holiday Edition
Carmen and Rachel wish you the merriest of the season. As you do, please enjoy some of our best episodes from last year. Starting with #14 on our list. Audio Books: Episode 35
The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys
Summary: Madrid, 1957. Under the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spain is hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, tourists and foreign businessmen flood into Spain under the welcoming promise of sunshine and wine. Among them is eighteen-year-old Daniel...
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Summary: They are the Pipers of Cape Breton Island — a family steeped in lies and unspoken truths that reach out from the past, forever mindful of the tragic secret that could shatter the family to its foundations. Chronicling five generations of this eccentric...
Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette
Summary: Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful...
Appearance of Evil by Christopher A. Lane
Summary: The author of "Eden's Gate" offers a psychological thriller with surprise twists and turns, set in the beautiful and peaceful community of Colorado Springs. The book is a stunning portrayal of nominal faith confronted with the heart's deep motives, the...
The Other Emily by Dean Koontz
Summary: A decade ago, Emily Carlino vanished after her car broke down on a California highway. She was presumed to be one of serial killer Ronny Lee Jessup’s victims whose remains were never found. Writer David Thorne still hasn’t recovered from losing the love of...
Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena
Summary: In this family, everyone is keeping secrets--especially the dead. Brecken Hill in upstate New York is an expensive place to live. You have to be rich to have a house there. And they don't come much richer than Fred and Sheila Merton. But even all their money...
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Summary: In her twenties, Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. They build a life for themselves, far away from the expectations of their parents and the people of their hometown in Massachusetts. They travel the world together, living life to the...
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
Summary: Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her...
Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Summary: Twelve-year-old Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat. As a ghost, he observes the devastation that’s been unleashed on his family and community in the wake of what they see as an unjust and brutal killing.Soon Jerome...
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Summary: The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys...
The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir by Jennifer Ryan
Summary: The village of Chilbury in Kent is about to ring in some changes. This is a delightful novel of wartime gumption and village spirit that will make your heart sing out. Kent, 1940. In the idyllic village of Chilbury change is afoot. Hearts are breaking as sons...
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Summary: A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up.Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the...
The Girl Before by J. P. Delaney
Summary: An enthralling psychological thriller that spins one woman's seemingly good fortune and another woman's mysterious fate through a kaleidoscope of duplicity, death, and deception.Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.The...
Dreamland Burning by Jennifer
Summary: When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family’s property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the past, the present, and herself.One hundred years earlier, a...
Beach Read by Emily Henry
Summary: Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They're polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the...
Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour
Summary: An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a...
Restoreth My Soul by Debbie Viguie
Summary: With Rosh Hashanah upon him the last thing Rabbi Jeremiah needs is to get involved with another mystery. This time, though, it is Detective Mark who pulls him in to help translate bloody Hebrew letters at a crime scene. It doesn’t take long before Cindy is...
Blue Marlin by Lee Smith
Summary: On a patched-up family vacation to Key West, a young girl seeks out movie stars and redemption for her fractured family.Lee Smith brings her masterful storytelling magic to this jewel of a novella that follows Jenny, an adventurous thirteen-year-old, down to...
The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
Summary: Escaping from an abusive marriage, seventeen-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant 1950s pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist—and confidante—to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the...
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Summary: Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if...
King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender
Summary: Twelve-year-old Kingston James is sure his brother Khalid has turned into a dragonfly. When Khalid unexpectedly passed away, he shed what was his first skin for another to live down by the bayou in their small Louisiana town. Khalid still visits in dreams,...
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Summary: Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity...
A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
Summary: Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.Kell was raised in Arnes—Red London—and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling...
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Summary: On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate the wedding of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Will is a rising television star, handsome and charming. Jules is a smart, ambitious magazine publisher. Though the sea is a little choppy and...
A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley
Summary: Award-winning author Alan Bradley returns with another beguiling novel starring the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The precocious chemist with a passion for poisons uncovers a fresh slew of misdeeds in the hamlet of...
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
Summary: Katherine V thought boys were grossKatherine X just wanted to be friendsKatherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mailK-19 broke his heart When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named...
A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash
Summary: A stunning debut reminiscent of the beloved novels of John Hart and Tom Franklin, A Land More Kind Than Home is a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small western North Carolina town For a curious boy...
Beekeeping for Beginners by Laurie R. King
Summary: Sherlock Holmes is fending off a particularly dark mood as he roams the Sussex Downs, in search of wild bees. The Great War may be raging across the Channel, but on the Downs, the great detective nears terminal melancholia—only to be saved by an encounter...
Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan
Summary: August 1969 San Francisco. Ajax Penumbra seeks a book--the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. Late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he...
The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure
Summary: Like most gentiles in Nazi-occupied Paris, architect Lucien Bernard has little empathy for the Jews. So when a wealthy industrialist offers him a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places for Jews, Lucien struggles with the choice of risking his life...
The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas
Summary: All her life, Mulan has trained for one purpose: to win the duel that every generation in her family must fight. If she prevails, she can reunite a pair of priceless heirloom swords separated decades earlier, and avenge her father, who was paralyzed in his...
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab
Summary: France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across...
A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons
Summary: When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the daughter of Carolina gentry. He was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and...
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Summary: At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate...
Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie, Bob Mayer
Summary: Agnes Crandall's life goes awry when a dognapper invades her kitchen one night, seriously hampering her attempts to put on a wedding that she's staked her entire net worth on. Then a hero climbs through her bedroom window. His name is Shane, no last name,...
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Summary: The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie, and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life. Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others’ suffering, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. To mend herself and help those in...
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Summary: Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil...
Aunt Dimity and the Duke by Nancy Atherton
Summary: A broken heart, a missing lantern, and a dead rock star... thank goodness being dead won't stop Aunt Dimity from lending a helping hand. Emma Porter is forty, fat, frumpy, and a passionate amateur gardener. When her longtime lover dumps her for a younger...
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Summary: The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his...
Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni
Summary: Angelology unfurled a brilliant tapestry of myth and biblical lore on our present-day world and plunged two star-crossed heroes into an ancient battle against mankind’s greatest enemy: the fatally attractive angel-human hybrids known as the Nephilim. With...
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Summary: When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence...
Bloody Mary by J.A. Konrath
Summary: Start with a tough but vulnerable Chicago cop. Add a hyperactive cat, an ailing mother, a jealous boyfriend, a high-maintenance ex-husband, and a partner in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Stir in a psychopath littering the city with body parts. Mix with...
Beside Still Waters by Debbie Viguié
Summary: Cindy travels to Hawaii over Memorial Day weekend for her long-planned vacation. Her dream vacation quickly becomes a nightmare though when she becomes swept up in sinister events and is kidnapped by ruthless men who will stop at nothing to keep her from...
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Summary: In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. Alas, in the opening sequence, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air...
Beach Girls by Luanne Rice
Summary: Luanne Rice is a rarity among novelists today; she's a true storyteller. Her unique ability to weave together the bonds of love and family with the challenges and rewards of everyday life has garnered her eight consecutive top-ten New York Times bestselling...
All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
Summary: Like the spellbinding psychological suspense in The Girl on the Train and Luckiest Girl Alive, Megan Miranda’s novel is a nail-biting, breathtaking story about the disappearances of two young women—a decade apart—told in reverse. It’s been ten years since...
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Summary: Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and her uppity, pretty younger sister, Bunny? Plus, she’s always in trouble at work—her preschool charges adore her, but their parents don’t always...
Bitter Is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office by Jen Lancaster
Summary: This is the story of how a haughty former sorority girl went from having a household income of almost a quarter-million dollars to being evicted from a ghetto apartment... It's a modern Greek tragedy, as defined by Roger Dunkle in The Classical Origins of...
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
Summary: In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked...
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Summary: First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking...
There There by Tommy Orange
Summary: Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying...
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Summary: A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history,...
The Christmas Train by David Baldacci
Summary: Disillusioned journalist Tom Langdon must get from Washington to L.A. in time for Christmas. Forced to take the train across the country because of a slight "misunderstanding" at airport security, he begins a journey of self-discovery and rude awakenings,...
The Christmas Pearl by Dorothea Benton Frank
Summary: Theodora is the matriarch of a family that has grown into a bunch of truculent knuckleheads. While she's finally gotten them all together in South Carolina to celebrate, this Christmas looks nothing like the extravagant, homey holidays of her childhood. What...
The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans
Summary: "Whatever the reason, I find that with each passing Christmas the story of the Christmas box is told less and needed more. So I record it now for all future generations to accept or dismiss, as seems them good. As for me, I believe. And it is, after all, my...
The Christmas List by Richard Paul Evans
Summary: The New York Times bestselling author of The Christmas Box returns with a holiday novel of hope, love, and redemption. My take: 4 looks Originally reviewed December 11, 2012 How is that for a short summary? ha! Here is my summary: James Kier is a ruthless...
The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg
Summary: In this wonderful novel about love and trust, hope and belief, Elizabeth Berg transports us to Nazareth in biblical times to reimagine the events of the classic Christmas story. We see Mary–young, strong, and inquisitive–as she first meets Joseph, a...
Aunt Dimity’s Christmas by Nancy Atherton
Summary: Lori Shepherd and her family spend Christmas in the cottage willed to her by her late Aunt Dimity, but when she discovers a stranger barely alive in the snow, she teams up with a priest and together they unveil the tragic secret that led the stranger to her...
Blue Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews
Summary: The popular Mary Kay Andrews delivers a tasty holiday treat as she brings back the winning characters from Savannah Blues and Savannah Breeze for a little Southern cheer. It's the week before Christmas, and antiques dealer Weezie Foley is in a frenzy to do up...
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Summary: A spare and haunting, wise and beautiful novel about the endurance of the human spirit and the subtle ways individuals reclaim their humanity in a city ravaged by war. In a city under siege, four people whose lives have been upended are ultimately reminded of...
A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman
Summary: In this bestselling and delightfully quirky debut novel from Sweden, a grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door. Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he...
Paris Trout by Pete Dexter
Summary: A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt. My take: 2 looks ...
The Pecan Man by Cassie Dandridge Selleck
Summary: The Pecan Man is a work of Southern fiction whose first chapter was the First Place winner of the 2006 CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition in the Unpublished Novel category. In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires...
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Summary: The highly anticipated follow-up to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life , "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn). Kate Atkinson's new novel tells the story of Ursula Todd's beloved younger brother Teddy - would-be poet, RAF...
Blessed Are the Cheesemakers by Sarah-Kate Lynch
Summary: Abby has been estranged from the family farm since her rebellious mother ran off with her when she was a small child. Kit is a burned out New York stockbroker who's down on his luck. But that's all about to change, now that he and Abby have converged on the...
Odd Hours by Dean Koontz
Summary: Strange times need strange heroes. Odd Thomas lives always between two worlds. He can see the lingering dead and knows that even in chaos, there is order, purpose, and strange meaning that invites our understanding but often thwarts it. Intuition has brought...
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Summary: Gabrielle Zevin’s enchanting novel is a love letter to the world of books--and booksellers--that changes our lives by giving us the stories that open our hearts and enlighten our minds. On the faded Island Books sign hanging over the porch of the Victorian...
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Summary: Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of...
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Summary: Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes...
every day by David Levithan
Summary: A has no friends. No parents. No family. No possessions. No home, even. Because every day, A wakes up in the body of a different person. Every morning, a different bed. A different room. A different house. A different life. A is able to access each person's...
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Summary: There were no surprises in Gatlin County. We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere. At least, that's what I thought. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. There was a curse. There was a girl. And in the end, there was a grave. Lena...
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Summary: Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my...
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Summary: A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across...
The Dark Glamour by Gabriella Pierce
Summary: Jane Boyle married her prince charming and moved into his upper east side castle--but she didn't get her fairy-tale ending It's hard to live happily ever after when you discover your demanding and controlling mother-in-law is literally a witch, determined to...
666 Park Avenue by Gabrielle Pierce
Summary: What if your mother-in-law turned out to be an evil, cold-blooded witch . . . literally? Ever since fabulously wealthy Malcolm Doran walked into her life and swept her off her feet, fledgling architect Jane Boyle has been living a fairy tale. When he proposes...
2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino
Summary: Madeleine Altimari is a smart-mouthed, precocious nine-year-old and an aspiring jazz singer. As she mourns the recent death of her mother, she doesn’t realize that on Christmas Eve she is about to have the most extraordinary day—and night—of her life. After...
14 by Peter Clines
Summary: Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches. There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his...
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Summary: If you had the chance to change the course of history, would you? Would the consequences be worth it? Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who teaches adults for extra money. One student submits a gruesome,...
29 by Adena Halpern
Summary: What if you closed your eyes, blew out the candles, and your wish came true? Ellie Jerome is a young-at-heart seventy-five-year-old who feels she has more in common with her twenty-nine-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, than her fifty-five-year-old daughter,...
Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson
Summary: In 1664 Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees the Old World and arrives in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines. He is the first in what will become a long line of peculiar physicians....
The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Summary: Carl Mørck used to be one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl—who didn’t draw his weapon—blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs
Summary: When Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan, comes to stay with his uncle Jonathan, he expects to meet an ordinary person. But he is wrong. Uncle Jonathan and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann, are both magicians! Lewis is thrilled. At first, watching magic is...
The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies
Summary: Nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper is newly married to a rich and charming widower, eager to join him on his tea plantation, determined to be the perfect wife and mother. But life in Ceylon is not what Gwen expected. The plantation workers are resentful, the...
The Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman
3Summary: For more than thirteen years, devoted father and husband Ethan Ford has been running from his past. But one day the police show up at his door-and his life as an irreproachable family man and heroic volunteer fireman begins to come apart. My take: 4 looks ...
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
Summary: A young couple who move into a Manhattan apartment are approached by their elderly neighbors, who want to be their friends. My take: 4 looks Originally reviewed November 8, 2013 Can you believe the short summary of this ground-breaking novel? Perhaps the...
Cold Fire by Dean Koontz
Summary: The classic story of reporter Holly Thorne, who is intrigued by the strange, quiet Jim Ironheart. Jim has saved 12 lives in three months, and now Holly's falling in love with him. But what power compels an ordinary man to be a hero? My take: 3 looks ...
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Summary: 'What are you thinking, Amy? The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions storm cloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you?...
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Summary: In this deeply suspenseful and irresistibly unnerving debut novel, a man and his girlfriend are on their way to a secluded farm. When the two take an unexpected detour, she is left stranded in a deserted high school, wondering if there is any escape at all....
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Summary: A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that...
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies by Alexander McCall Smith
Summary: In the newest addition to the universally beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the charming and ever-resourceful Precious Ramotswe finds herself overly beset by problems. She is already busier than usual at the detective agency when added to her...
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
Summary: On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the...
The Art of Saying Goodbye by Ellen Bache
Summary: She was the thread that wove their tapestry together. With a group of women as diverse as the ladies from Brightwood Trace, you might not think them to be close. There's Julianne, a nurse with an unsettling psychic ability that allows her to literally feel...