4.5 Stars. This is a slim volume and much of it is taken up with Mrs. Ritter, her husband, and his friend Karl’s day-to-day survival in Svalbard (Formerly Spitsbergen). Fair warning, that survival isn’t really for those who are disturbed by hunting for food and for furs to sell. Just trying to keep wood […]
5 Stars. I just need to say that this book was fantastic. It’s hefty, coming in at 518 pages, but there’s even more to to chew over and unpack than meets the eye. It’s written in three parts (because of course a book about wishes would be written in three parts) and each takes a slightly different approach […]
4 Stars. Overall, I enjoyed this more than the first book. I missed her frequent conversations with God, but I found it easier to relate to troubled teenage Marjane than activist child Marjane. I was busy playing with Barbies when I was ten, not trying to figure out how I could sneak out to political rallies that frequently […]
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 Stars. I wasn’t quite sure to what to expect when I downloaded this book from the library but I liked it. It’s quirky and funny but there’s a lot of substance lurking beneath the exterior. won’t hazard a guess as to what might be “wrong” with Keiko but she really doesn’t think like most other people. But is that bad? She […]
3 Stars. Eh. Axel was a whiny wimp who complained endlessly about having to go on the trip. The minute his uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, started to get the least bit angry with him over his dithering, Axel would cave and blithely go along with whatever ridiculous plan the professor has in mind. Axel was generally the one with […]
3 Stars. I’m about to write a huge sweeping statement that I really shouldn’t but here goes. I just don’t do well with South American authors. That’s not fair. I’ve only read three or four, I think. But I never have a clue what’s actually going on. What’s real, what’s not, what the “not real” things are supposed to […]
Allan Karlsson impulsively leaves his nursing home by way of his bedroom window on the day of his 100th birthday. There was no real decision-making involved; it was just done. So there he is, on the run in his “pee slippers” (so called because 100-year-old men don’t reliably miss their shoes in the bathroom) and […]
Jean Perdu is a broken man, not really living his life but only existing. His one great love left him twenty years ago and he’s never moved on. He puts together gigantic puzzles in his spartan apartment and sells books on his book barge, The Literary Apothecary. He knows exactly the right book to sell […]
I walked into the library on my lunch break to pick up a nonfiction book for my before-bed reading. I have enough unread novels at home. I was not going to check out any fiction. I grabbed the book I was there for and then started wandering the fiction stacks. It couldn’t hurt to just […]
Tin Win is a successful lawyer who simply walks out of his life one day. His children have both graduated from college so he apparently has decided that he’s a free man. There’s a search but it quickly comes to a dead end in Bangkok. His daughter Julia decides several years later to go looking […]