4 Stars. The ninth entry in the Amelia Peabody series is another solid mystery with the usual delightful characters against the backdrop of Egyptian archaeology in its most famous heyday. The author introduced some memorable new characters who I either appropriately loved or loathed, as intended [...]
4 Stars. I picked this up from The Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Pacific Grove, CA, pretty close to the actual Cannery Row. In fact, I just realized exactly how close I was. Dang it. Missed opportunity because I did not go there. Anyway, as I read, I enjoyed reading Steinbeck’s descriptions [...]
4 Stars. There’s a lot going on here as John Lewis transitions his life story from March to Run. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were finally passed at the end of March: Book Three but that doesn’t mean that the struggle is over. The book feels a little chaotic to me but it’s about a chaotic [...]
4 Stars. I thoroughly enjoy poring over the "Maps for Curious Minds" books. The authors and illustrators cleverly share data, both widely known and obscure, in fun, colorful maps and graphs. I find myself texting my husband and my sister with random facts while they're each trying to work. This was [...]
4 Stars. It's been quite a while since I read any books in this series because I somehow missed that a fourth one existed! I can't say that there was a whole lot going on here, plot-wise. There were a few things but they felt and largely turned out to be low-stakes. Mostly I just enjoyed re-visiting Weezie [...]
4 Stars. I’m not a huge romance reader and even less of a young adult romance reader but I’ve watched my share of rom-coms and this is a rom-com with the cutest of meet cutes. I adored it. And what reader could resist its charms? Dash and Lily’s paths cross when Lily leaves a red notebook with a dare hidden [...]
4 Stars. I listened to Connie Willis's collection of her own Christmas stories (A Lot Like Christmas) last year and went searching for more of her work. I stumbled on this anthology that she edited and decided to give it a try. The quality of the stories was remarkably consistent! The stories are arranged [...]
4 Stars. In this atmospheric mystery, I wasn’t even entirely sure who had been murdered until the end, much less who did it. I feel like I should have guessed the culprit because the clues were all there but I didn’t. The characters are largely unlikeable, even to each other. They’re that group of [...]
4 Stars. I loved Jennifer Wright’s book, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. I loved her humor in tackling a pretty grim subject. She brings the same humor to this examination of some spectacular break-ups. She shines a light on the following couples: 1. Nero [...]
4 Stars. The last time I was in Charleston, SC, one or two tours that I went on mentioned Eliza Lucas. Her father left her in charge of his plantations near Charleston in the 1740s while he went to war with the Spanish in the Caribbean. That really caught my attention. A woman running plantations? At that [...]