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?
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...
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...
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....