After following the Northern Alliance troops around Afghanistan and reporting on the fall of the Taliban, journalist Åsne Seierstad finds herself in Kabul. She stumbles upon a bookshop and goes in. She and the proprietor, Sultan, hit it off at first and she is invited to spend a little time with his family. She thinks […]
After many years vacationing in Italy, Frances Mayes and her–husband? I don’t think that’s ever clarified–decide to buy a home in Tuscany. They search for a while, but nothing really calls to them. Then they stumble upon a home called Bramasole in the town of Cortona. It’s a wreck, but they can’t get it out […]
This is a story told from many points of view. First is Zebulon Vance, the real life Civil War governor of North Carolina. We follow him from his days as a hotel porter fresh off the farm until his rise to governor. Next is Malinda Blalock, a tough mountain woman who follows her husband to […]
A serial killer has been viciously murdering women in the Combat Zone, a seedy area of Newford. He makes a mistake when he kills a wealthy man’s daughter, apparently mistaking her for one of the prostitutes he normally targets. There’s a witness to this one too. He swears the killer stepped out of the side […]
Miles Roby is the manager of The Empire Grill in the heart of Empire Falls, Maine–or what’s left of it, anyway. This once-thriving industrial town is dying now that the factories have all closed. Empire Falls still has a tightly-knit, optimistic community though. There are constantly rumors about new buyers for the factories. Miles feels […]
It’s only been about a week since I read this book, but I’m already hazy on the details, so this will be vague. Basically, this super-rich guy hires an engineering firm with a perfect record of doing the “impossible” to extract a meteorite from the ground of a Chilean island off of Cape Horn. In […]
Kendra and Seth are nearing the end of the school year when a new guy joins Kendra’s class. The other girls talk about how cute he is, but all Kendra sees is a disgusting goblin who plays cruel tricks on people. A mysterious stranger offers to help them get rid of the goblin (or kobold, […]
Meggie Folchart and her father, Mo, find themselves on the run from a mysterious man that Meggie knows only as “Capricorn.” Capricorn is chasing after them, trying to steal a book that they own, and he won’t stop at anything to get it. First off, let me say that I’m about 20 years older than […]
Dreams Made Flesh is a collection of four short stories/novellas centered around Jaenelle and her court. One of the events takes place immediately after the third in the Black Jewels series, so anyone reading this should keep that in mind. It definitely has spoilers for the previous books. My favorite story by far, was “The […]
Jared is one of the more powerful members of the Blood, the vaguely aristocratic magic-wielding rulers of the lands he lives in. After a life-alteringly bad choice in his teens, Jared has become a pleasure slave for the Queens and Witches of Hayll. After nine years of bowing to sadistic whims, he does something that […]
**Possible spoilers for the first two in the series, Daughter of the Blood and Heir to the Shadows.** The evil queens, Dorothea and Hekatah, are trying to force a war and so gain control of Jaenelle. But they have no idea how strong she is or the lengths she is willing to go to in […]