4 Stars. Oh my goodness. I think I need to be friends with T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon). The book starts out pretty light and fluffy. I laughed quite a bit. Even when things start getting serious, Kara and Simon face their fears with snarky humor. They’re my kind of people. So much so that I suddenly added up a whole bunch of […]
3 Stars. You can imagine my surprise when I listened to World War Z and discovered that I was… a little bored. There. I said it. The format is very similar to that used in Devolution, with a fictional interviewer speaking with survivors of a catastrophic event. I think the difference for me was that Devolution also included a […]
2.5 Stars. If I had read this in print, I think I would have rated it higher. Don’t get me wrong–I absolutely enjoyed Todd Haberkorn’s narration. But I don’t absorb detail as well when listening as I do in print so I need things to move along quickly without getting too complicated. And Andrew’s life is incredibly complicated […]
4 Stars. I generally like reading horror. I get spooked, I have fun, I move on. Demons and/or possession are too scary for me and I’m not happy with way over the top, incredibly gory violence, but otherwise I’m good. Hendrix delivers on the “spooking me” front. In the world of this book, six women survived their own real-life […]
3 Stars. I’m just not the reader for magical realism in literature. Oh, I do just fine with Sarah Addison Allen’s light touches of fantasy in otherwise contemporary novels. But a huge black beast of an unknown species adopting a family? Spirits wandering the house? Curses? Mermaid girls? All in dark historical fiction? I just […]
4.5 Stars. I got behind on the monthly prompts for the Diversity Reading Challenge in August so I was looking for a short book about mental health or addiction when I stumbled on this title. It seemed like the perfect choice to help me catch up. But what started as a book I was reading simply to check a box quickly became a […]
3 Stars. I’m not a fan of New York. To be fair, I’ve only spent one day there and that was the day after my best friend’s funeral; still, nothing about the city has ever appealed to me. That said, Time and Again didn’t work particularly well for me but I think those who love New York and its history will relish it. I don’t […]
4 Stars. I’m not a huge fan of Westerns but this book caught my eye when a friend of a friend mentioned it on Facebook. I really enjoyed it. There’s no denying the Western background but the themes of family, love, and loss are universal. I would actually recommend this for a book club. Jess’s mother died in childbirth and Jess […]
4 Stars. The Hildegard in these pages was fascinating. She was a strategist but she also had a heart to care for others. She was “only” a woman but she was a woman with connections and she wasn’t afraid to use them. As she grew older, she called out hypocrisy and inhumane practices. God was always female in her visions. She was […]
5 Stars. As I read this, I periodically thought of that adage stating that to be a writer, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed” (I’m going to attribute this to Walter “Red” Smith, citing Quote Investigator). Ms. Ward’s pain and grief comes through in these pages almost viscerally. Growing up poor […]
4 Stars. I found this book absolutely fascinating. The remarkable thing about Ada’s survival is that she knew very little about surviving Arctic conditions. She was raised in the village of Nome. She’d seen some Inuit (the preferred term now) elders hunting and employing traditional skills when she was very young but she […]