Carmen is Bubbly Bibbly’s official book reviewer. She will offer summaries of books of note.
Carmen’s recommendations are awesome and insightful.
Carmen’s reviews are less like prose and more like having a conversation with her. She always has a brilliant take on story lines and characters. Her reviews are consistently on point. Carmen’s reviews will make you smile, especially when she has a bone to pick.
Carmen’s Rating System
1 Look – I wish I hadn’t looked.
2 Looks – I looked and didn’t like what I saw
3 Looks – I looked and I liked it. As a matter of fact, I probably looked again.
4 Looks – An ogle. I looked and turned my head to see it from the back.
5 Looks – What’s your name and number, baby?
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...