An alphabetical list of all of Carmen’s reviews. For a specific title, please use our search feature. Enjoy!
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz
Summary: Enter the world of the Pendleton: The original owner became a recluse - and was rumored to be more than half mad - after his wife and two children disappeared in 1897 and were never found. The second owner suffered a worse tragedy in 1935, when his house...
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Summary: This charming classic, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
Summary: To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life....
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...
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...
A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff
Summary: Phoebe Sanders runs her own vintage dress shop. But while she stitches and repairs couture suits and glorious dresses, there is something in Phoebe's own past that she cannot restore, and which is stopping her searching for love. My take: 4 looks Originally...
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...
A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
Summary: We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in...
A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum
Summary: In Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Deya is starting to meet with suitors. Though she doesn’t want to get married, her grandparents give her no choice. History is repeating itself: Deya’s mother, Isra, also had no choice when she left Palestine as a teenager to...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
Summary: Abandoned as a Child on the steps of St Rose Convent in New York. Evangeline Cacciatore grew up knowing little of her parents. Assisting a scholar in the convent one day, she uncovers a disturbning secret conected to her family. My take: 4 looks Originally...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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
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.
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...
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...
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...
Black Out by Lisa Unger
Summary: When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic. On the surface, Annie Powers’ life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Centuries of June by Keith Donohue
Summary: Face down on the bathroom floor after "a conk on the skull," Jack, the narrator of Donohue's unconventional latest, embarks on an epic and darkly funny journey through time and space without traveling much beyond his own bathroom. My take: 3.5 looks ...
Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons
Summary: A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery...
Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery by Charles Martin
Summary: They have one summer to find what was lost long ago. "Never settle for less than the truth," she told him. But when you don't even know your real name, the truth gets a little complicated. It can nestle so close to home it's hard to see. It can even flourish...
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 ...
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...
Dark Objects by Gillian Flynn
Summary: I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She...
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
Summary: The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named...
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....
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...
Educated by Tara Westover
Summary: Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed...
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...
Elevation by Stephen King, Mark Edward Geyer
Summary: Although Scott Carey doesn’t look any different, he’s been steadily losing weight. There are a couple of other odd things, too. He weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott doesn’t want to be poked and prodded. He...
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...
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...
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Summary: Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the...
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...
Fury by Salman Rushdie
Summary: Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he...
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...
Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, Ricardo Cortés (Illustrator)
Summary: Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book...
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?...
Great House by Nichole Krauss
Summary: For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police, one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away,...
Green Angel by Alice Hoffman
Summary: Left on her own when her family dies in a terrible disaster, fifteen-year-old Green is haunted by loss and by the past. Struggling to survive physically and emotionally in a place where nothing seems to grow and ashes are everywhere, Green retreats into the...
Harry’s Trees by Jon Cohen
Summary: The first thing you learn when you climb a tree is to hold on. Now it’s time for Harry to learn to let go… Thirty-four-year-old Harry Crane, lifelong lover of trees, works as an analyst in a treeless US Forest Service office. When his wife dies...
Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer, Richard Armitage
Summary: Leningrad, Russia, 1968. Alexander Karpenko is no ordinary child, and from an early age, it is clear he is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, he and his mother will have to escape from Russia...
House by Frank Peretti
Summary: Enter House - where you'll find yourself thrown into a killer's deadly game in which the only way to win is to lose...and the only way out is in. The stakes of the game become clear when a tin can is tossed into the house with rules scrawled on it. Rules that...
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia De Luce #4) by Alan Bradley
Summary: It's Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce - an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving - is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when...
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells
Summary: John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it. He's spent his life doing his best not to live up to his potential. He's obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn't want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives...
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....
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...
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,...
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,...
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Summary: In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a...
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...
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Summary: Written with a delightfully dry sense of humour and the wisdom of a born storyteller, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand explores the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of family obligation and tradition. When retired Major Pettigrew strikes up an...
Matched by Ally Condie
Summary: Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one…until she sees another face...
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Summary: The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures...
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Summary: A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children , an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading...
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...
Negrophilia by Erik Rush
Summary: Negrophilia studies the undue and inordinate affinity for blacks (as opposed to antipathy toward them) that has been promoted by activists, politicians and the establishment press for the past 40 years and which has fostered an erroneous perception of blacks,...
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Summary: Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever? These nine perfect strangers are about to find out... Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons...
Noir by Christopher Moore
Summary: San Francisco. Summer, 1947. A dame walks into a saloon . . .It’s not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It’s love at first sight, but...
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Summary: At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at...
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Summary: Charlie Manx burned a man to death in his black 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith, but that’s not the worst of it. Rumor has it that he kidnapped dozens of children, taking them to a place he calls “Christmasland.” The only child ever to escape was a very lucky girl...
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...
October Baby by Eric Wilson
Summary: "You saw me before I was born." Psalm 139:16 (NLT) As the curtain rises, Hannah hesitantly steps onto the stage for her theatrical debut in college. Yet before she can utter her first lines, Hannah—unscripted—collapses in front of the stunned audience. After...
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...
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Summary: Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. My take: 3 looks Originally reviewed August 15, 2011 Why have I never read this before? It is on the required reading for so many high schools...Well, it was a good read. Short...
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...
Operation Bonnet by Kimberly Stuart
Summary: Twenty-year-old Nellie Monroe has a restless brilliance that makes her a bit of an odd duck. She wants to be a private investigator, even though her tiny hometown offers no hope of clients. Until she meets Amos Shetler, an Amish dropout carrying a torch for...