Middletide by Sarah Crouch

May 15, 2024

Middletide by Sarah Crouch

Early one morning, two fishermen find the body of Dr. Erin Landry hanging from a tree near their favorite fishing spot, an apparent suicide. But the sheriff isn't so sure - something about the scene isn't right. As he investigates the death, someone points in the direction of Elijah Leith, a town resident who wrote a mystery novel over a decade earlier, describing the exact scene of the doctor's death.

This is a debut novel, with multiple timelines that switch frequently. The plot is very slow-moving, crawling for about 75% of the book, with a lot of narrative about eating, nature, and homesteading/living off the land, as well as Elijah's sorry love life. For some reason, the author decided to make up a fictional Native American tribe, which added to the confusion. The characters are all blah, except for the victim. Not recommended unless you enjoy a little bit of mystery mixed with what is mostly high school style romance. Hopefully the author will do better on her next outing.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Making It So by Patrick Stewart

December 8, 2023

Making It So by Patrick Stewart

Legendary actor Sir Patrick Stewart writes about his long acting career as well as his personal life. This is a wonderful memoir, one of the best that I read in 2023. While he takes his craft seriously, he doesn't take himself too seriously and tells wonderful anecdotes about his life and career. Patrick Stewart has been one of my secret crushes since I saw him as Sejanus in the BBC production of I, Claudius in the 1970s (my other secret crush for the last 40 years is Joe Montana, the star quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers). I was never that much of a Star Trek fan (I know - gasp!) but I saw enough of ST: TNG to be familiar with the characters and the storyline.

Lots of great pictures. He is very honest about losing his hair by the time he was 20, his love affairs and marriages, and his relationships with other actors and directors. Highly recommended to fans of Star Trek or Sir Patrick's other work.

Patrick Stewart as Sejanus in I, Claudius

Picasso's Lovers by Jeanne Mackin

November 16, 2023

Picasso's Lovers by Jeanne Mackin

Pablo Picasso changed women like some men change their clothes. Nobody was off limits, and he didn't care if he hurt his wife Olga or whoever was his current mistress. He looked upon these women as his muses, his inspiration, and if he was going to paint a woman, he was also going to have sex with her. When aspiring journalist Alan Olsen receives an assignment from an art magazine to write something new about Picasso, she gets more than she bargained for.

I really liked Mackin's previous book The Last Collection, about Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel. I didn't find this one quite so compelling, probably because I'm not a huge Picasso fan. I found the last third of the book to be predictable, no surprises here, and I found myself doing a lot of skimming. If you're a big Picasso fan or read only historical fiction, you'll probably enjoy this one. If you're a woman, you'll probably think Picasso was a real jerk who used women and then tossed them aside. Just saying.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Irene Lagut, an artist who was a contemporary of Picasso and also one of his lovers

Murder Your Employer: the McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

September 19, 2023

Murder Your Employer: the McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Tucked away in the idyllic countryside of somewhere (not even the student body is sure exactly where they are) is the McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts. The applied arts that the students study are how to get away with murder. The three characters that the story focuses on all want to murder their employer, a feeling that most of us have had at one point. But in order to graduate, the students must successfully complete an all-night hunt where they are hunter, prey, or both.

The Hunger Games meets Hogwarts and Naomi Novik's Scholomance series. Not really a mystery since we know from the start who the targets are and who wants to murder them. The format is clever, since it is written in the form of a textbook with student evaluations included. It had humorous moments and held my interest until it got to the all-night hunt. The second half started to drag and would have benefited from having at least 50 pages edited out of the second half. 

Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiaverini

September 8, 2023

Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiaverini

At the outset of World War I, three women from different backgrounds all sign up for war work at a munitions plant just outside London. Two are assigned to shell assembly while the third carves out a place in administration as welfare supervisor. Shell assembly involves handling TNT which turns the women's skin yellow and their hair orange (hence the name canary girls). To keep up morale, the munitionettes form a football (soccer) team and compete against teams from other plants.

This has been described as Rosie the Riveter meets A League of Their Own, and I think that's a fair description. It's a look at the home front during World War I: doing war work, coping with rationing, trying to keep up morale while worrying about loved one serving at the front. The story was slow moving. I'm not really into sports (especially not soccer), so I skimmed over the parts of soccer matches and plays. Also, I think I could assemble an artillery shell from the repeated descriptions of the work. I think one of the reasons that I didn't love this more is that I'm tired of World War I and World War II fiction. Recommended for readers who enjoy historical fiction or fiction about women's lives.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Two canary girls

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

September 3, 2023

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

At the age of 12, the unnamed main character is married off to a much older man who is part of their Christian community, and sent to live in Kerala. There is an odd affliction in the family: in every generation, someone dies by drowning. Her husband is so superstitious about it that he refuses to travel by boat, even though he spends twice as much time walking to get where he needs to go. Over the next 75 years, the family grows and endures, despite hardship and tragedy.

OMG, this is unbelievable! I read all 700 pages over the Labor Day weekend - I was emotionally exhausted when I finished. I loved Verghese's earlier novel Cutting for Stone so I was a little hesitant to start his new book. How could anything measure up? But it absolutely did. I loved every word. I feel sorry for the next few authors that I read since I'm going to be ruined for anything else for awhile. A family saga, a political and historical novel, a love story but not a romance. Outstanding, highly recommended for readers of literary fiction or family sagas.

Kerala, India

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

August 19, 2023

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

David lives with his father, his new stepmother, and his new half-brother. He is a lonely child, desperately missing his dead mother and feeling unwanted by the rest of the family. He loses himself in books, mainly fairy tales, until one night, he wanders into the garden following the sound of his mother's voice, and is swallowed by a tree. The tree turns out to be a portal to another world that David calls Elsewhere. There are familiar fairy tale figures but they appear and act differently than they did in the stories he read. David wants to go home more than anything, but first he has to find the king, who has a book that may hold the answer on how to get there.

Grimm's Fairy Tales (the original gruesome ones) meets the Wizard of Oz. David is on a quest where he meets people who help him and others who try to hinder him. He feels his mother's death is somehow his fault, even though she died after a long illness that sounds like cancer. At the same time, he feels abandoned, and that if he would just disappear, his father could have a new life with his new family.

I read this book when it first came out and decided to re-read it before I get the sequel (The Land of Lost Things). While there is a lot going on here about the psychology of fairy tales and mythology, you can also read the book just for the enjoyment of David's story. The sequel is coming out in the fall of 2023.

A fairy tale cottage

Excavations by Hannah Michell

July 18,. 2023

Excavations by Hannah Michell

After a day spent looking after her children, Sae is looking forward to her husband Jae coming home from his job with a small engineering firm subcontracted to do work for a major Seoul corporation. But then there is a news report that the building where Jae is working has collapsed and hundreds of people are trapped or dead. Sae goes in search of her husband, but as the days pass with no sign of him, Sae begins to uncover more and more deception, eroding away at what she believed was their life.

I enjoyed this novel a lot more than I expected to when I started it. There are different types of excavations going on: the building site, unethical business practices at the corporate level, a karaoke salon where businessmen gather and spill their secrets, Jae's hidden past, what Sae thought was their life together. You can feel Sae's growing desperation as the days pass and she is unable to get answers about what happened to her husband. Thoughtful contemporary fiction.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Seoul, Korea

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

July 13, 2023

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Monserrat and Tristan work in the Mexican film industry: Monserrat is a struggling sound editor in a male-dominated field, while Tristan, a former soap opera star until his career was cut short by a car accident, takes whatever work he can get, mostly doing voice-overs. When Tristan moves to a new apartment, he makes the acquaintance of legendary horror movie director Abel Urueta. Urueta convinces them to dub in the voices on an old piece of black and white film, and their luck appears to change for the better. But then bad things start to happen, and they realize that they may have unleashed evil powers that they can't control.

Contemporary horror fiction with lots of history about the Mexican film industry. Silver nitrate was used for black and white film production in the golden age of cinema, and while it produced beautiful images, it is highly flammable. Silver was also used in occult rituals. Recommended for readers of horror fiction or anyone interested in the film industry.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Still from a low-budget Mexican horror film

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

June 14, 2023

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

A Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis, a girl and her father escaping El Salvador, and a child separated from her family at the U.S./Mexico border. These are all characters in Allende's latest book.

I love Isabel Allende's writing so was happy to receive an eARC of her latest novel. This one was all over the place, so it was hard to tell what the story was at first or how the various characters would come together. It almost read like a collection of short stories strung together by the threads of being a refugee and losing one's family. An important story, but my least favorite Allende book so far.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review. 

Refugee children at the U.S./Mexico border

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

June 9, 2023

The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry

Hazel and her sister Flora Lea are among the children evacuated from London to the English countryside near Oxford during the London Blitz. One day, Flora goes missing, never to be found. The local police believe she drowned in the river near their temporary home. Years later, Hazel is working for a rare book dealer and is about to start her dream job at Sotheby's. Processing new arrivals for the shop, Hazel finds a book filled with modern fairy stories set in a world called Whisperwood. But they are the stories that Hazel used to make up for Flora Lea, and she has never shared them with anyone else. Did Flora write the stories down, and does this mean she is still alive? Does someone else know what happened to the little girl?

A mystery, a missing person, a book about books and stories. This novel appeared to tick all the boxes for me, and I have enjoyed the author's previous books. I like the story at the beginning but then it got long with too many unnecessary side characters and repetitious scenes. I did a lot of skimming, and the solution was okay even if the ending was a little too tidy, and it took a really long time to get there. Maybe I didn't connect with the characters. Maybe I've had enough of World War II fiction for a while. I really wish I had liked it more.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher

May 25, 2023

What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher

Barbara Butcher was an medicolegal death investigator for the New York Office of the City Medical Examiner for 22 years. Her job was to go out to death scenes to collect information, examine the remains and the surroundings, and determine the manner of death (accident, suicide, homicide, natural causes, misadventure). 

Riveting account of a job that most of us know very little about. The author treated both the victims and their families with dignity and respect. The chapters about working at the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks are particularly intense. Not something to read while eating dinner. Highly recommended to readers of narrative nonfiction and true crime.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

The Pile (aka Ground Zero) at the World Trade Center

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style by Paul Rudnick

May 20, 2023

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style by Paul Rudnick

Wealthy Farrell Covington and Jersey Jewish boy Nate Reminger met during their first term at Yale and fell in love, and stayed that way for the next 50 years. Farrell has buckets of style - of course, he has the mega-millions to pay for style - and Nate can't quite believe that Farrell wants to be with him. But Farrell's family refuse to accept that their son is gay and go to great lengths to separate the pair. But their love persists, overcoming everything that comes their way.

The first two thirds of the book were good, very entertaining, but then it started to go off the tracks. One of the characters develops AIDS (it's the 1980s) and then the story starts to get loopy. Really - if you're diagnosed with AIDS or any terminal disease, would you run off and leave your long-term beloved partner for TWO YEARS? And the reason the character goes off is actually pretty stupid - you have to be a mega-rich person to think that it's important. I wouldn't but I'm hetero, so I checked with some of my gay friends and they all agreed they would never do that. Falls kind of flat at the end. Disappointing.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

The Girls of Summer by Katie Bishop

May 17, 2023

The Girls of Summer by Katie Bishop

Before starting college, Rachel and her best friend Caroline spent a summer traveling in Europe, ending up working at a dive bar at an upscale resort on a Greek island. Eighteen years later, she returns with her husband to find the place greatly changed, now a tourist destination rather than an exclusive resort. But when she runs into a woman she worked with, memories that Rachel would rather forget begin to surface.

Similar to My Dark Vanessa, with teenaged girls being abused by older manipulative men. I thought this would be a good summer read, but it's not - rather than being fun and suspenseful, it's depressing and there were no surprises. I didn't feel a connection to the characters or particularly care what happened to them. Rachel in particular is completely brainwashed. It felt like the author was trying to cash in on the current Me Too movement. I did a lot of skimming, especially in the second half of the book. Disappointing.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Greek islands

The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring

May 12, 2023

The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring

Dalton is a small town in Maine, where everyone is linked to everyone else: Bridget Frazier's parents own the lumber mill, the largest employer in the town; Bridget is married to police officer Nate Theroux and they have a new baby; Nate's mother Bev manages the local nursing home and is having an affair with library director Trudy Haskell (both Bev and Trudy's husbands know about the affair and choose to ignore it); Trudy is married to the town doctor; Rose Douglas is one of Dr. Haskell's patients and is in an abusive relationship with the father of her children. Then the sudden death of a town resident affects everyone living in Dalton.

Taking place over the course of one year, this is a quiet lovely book about interlinked lives that will break your heart. In a small town, everyone knows everyone else's business, public or private, or so they think. But you never really know what is going on inside someone else's life or marriage, no matter how perfect it looks from the outside. Readers who enjoyed A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella will enjoy The Road to Dalton.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Aroostook County, northern Maine

48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister by Joyce Carol Oates

April 20, 2023

48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister by Joyce Carol Oates

Marguerite Fulmer, known to her sister as M, leaves for work one morning and vanishes. Her family, co-workers, former boyfriends, and the police are baffled. M's sister Georgene (G or Gigi) begin collecting clues that the police have missed, dismissed, or ignored. Or that G has hidden from them.

Psychological fiction with a truly unreliable narrator and not a single likable character, except maybe Lena the housekeeper. JCO is a master of this type of ambiguous story. It's not going to appeal to everyone - you have to enjoy having your mind messed with.

The Postcard by Anne Berest

April 14, 2023

The Postcard by Anne Berest

In 2003, a Jewish woman living in Paris receives a postcard, bearing only the names of four family members who died at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. Years later, she tells her daughter Anne the story of her grandparents and about receiving the postcard. Anne becomes obsessed with tracking down the postcard's sender, exploring her family's history while also musing on what it means to be a Jew today as well as historically.

Part family history, part French history, part Jewish history, part mystery. This is a profoundly moving story of lost loves, survivors, and a family missing vital parts. Not an easy read, but one that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished. This title is sure to win literary prizes and appear on best-books-of-the-year lists. Highly recommended. 

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Prisoners at Auschwitz, the main death camp, where the author's family perished

Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl by Renee Rosen

March 22, 2023

Fifth Avenue Glamor Girl by Renee Rosen

At the height of the Great Depression, Gloria Downing's father is jailed for having swindled thousands of people out of their live savings in a Ponzi scheme. Broke, homeless and basically unemployable, Gloria takes a job as a shampoo girl at a beauty salon, where she meets an enterprising young woman named Estee Lauder. Estee has created a new cosmetics line and will stop at nothing to get her products into the finest department stores and become famous in the process. Both Gloria and Estee are hiding secrets - when those secrets start catching up with them, will they be able to outrun their pasts?

Very enjoyable story about two women forced to reinvent themselves at a difficult time in American history. I love novels about the fashion and beauty industry, so this one called my name. Fans of Fiona Davis, Marie Benedict, and Jeanne Mackin (The Last Collection) will enjoy this fictionalized biography of one of the icons of the cosmetics industry.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

Estee Lauder

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

March 21, 2023

Ginny, aka Big, lives with her daughter Liza and Liza's daughter Mosey. Big was 15 when Liza was born, and Liza was 15 when Mosey was born, and Big is hoping that Mosey will break the family pattern now that she is about to turn 15. Liza had a stroke the year before, and Big is responsible for her care as well as working to support the family. When an infant's skeletal remains are found buried in their backyard, Mosey and her BFF Roger decide to investigate.

I love family secrets. My parents and grandparents worked very hard to be beige, boring and middle-classed. Their biggest goal was keeping up with the Joneses (or in their case, the Asches). And this book has lots of family secrets, and also a lot of family love and loyalty. I have read previous books by Jackson and enjoy her tangled family stories with a little mystery thrown in. Fans of Diane Chamberlain and Kate Morton will enjoy Jackson's novels.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

February 16, 2023

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead (nee Damon Fields) is born to a single teen-aged mother in the mountains of Appalachia, with few assets other than the good looks and coppery hair that he inherited from his absent (possibly dead) father. Demon's mother has a weakness for drugs and alcohol, as well as poor judgment when it comes to men. After her fatal overdose, Demon finds himself first tossed into the foster care system, then as a runaway on his own, exposed to all of the dangers of an adolescent without an adult to look after them.

An adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield: orphan forced out into the world on his own, far too soon, with no one to care for him. There are references throughout the text to Dickens' novel, including the neighbors who look after him sporadically named the Peggots (as opposed to Peggotty in David Copperfield). While her novels have been hit or miss for me, I enjoyed several of Kingsolver's previous books, including The Poisonwood Bible and Animal Dreams, so I was very much looking forward to reading her latest book. At first I was interested in the characters but my interest starting waning after a couple hundred pages, and by the time Demon gets into opiods, it had become pretty depressing and I was over it and skimmed the last 250 pages. I also didn't like the stereotypes of Appalachia and rural people. Disappointing.

David Copperfield