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?
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...