I don’t often read novels in verse. They aren’t my thing, but Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel, “The Poet X,” is making think I have been missing out. Acevedo tells the story of Xiomara who feels ignored at home and school, but is also the target unwanted attention from both her classmates and mother. The boys […]
Jane Harper has again offered American readers another gripping and complex tale of life in the Australian outback. The harsh Queensland outback is almost a character in this story of the outwardly happy family no one really knows about. Harper’s recurring motif is how treacherous and unforgiving this environment is. The land is populated with […]
A beautiful story of three terribly hurt people — a man, a woman, a child – in rural 1960’s Australia. Where does healing come from? Sometimes we have to have the heart to create a family (and a bookstore) where none existed before. Don’t miss this gorgeous wrenching story of grief and healing.
I listened to this charming story of a young man, unexpectedly pushed into being Emperor of the Ethuveraz, learning to govern while earning his own and others’ respect. Maia, the son of the late Emperor, an imperious and cruel man who is killed in an airship crash, along with the three sons he acknowledges, had […]
Not all lead characters in Elinor Lipman novels are charming, some you want to strangle, but the way in the which they complicate their lives makes for a good time. Daphne, recently divorced, is floundering. She decides to clean out her apartment of that which does not give her joy, including the small town high […]
Free will and the freedom to use it are all that Sancia , twenty year old resourceful orphan, wants. Oh, and enough money to buy food for herself. This latest thieving job is way overpaid so she is sure to have enough food for a good long time. It sounds like it will be easy. […]
Chaya and Asher’s story circles around and runs through the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The two, immigrants from the old country, flee the midwest farm where they have landed to come to find their fortune in the big city. Chicago, recovered from the Fire of 1871, is booming. The factories, stockyards, sweatshops, brothels employ thousands of […]
What is the difference between surviving and living? The four Gold children, ages seven to thirteen, of the Lower East Side, visit a fortune teller in 1969 who predicts the date of each one’s death. How to react to this news? Each comes at it with a mixture of belief, disbelief, scepticism. We all know […]
If you like a lot of science with your fiction, this one’s for you. Due to rapidly increasing bolide strikes from pieces of rock knocked off an impacted moon, Earth is splitting apart and burning. How to ensure that humanity survives for the next 5000 or so years that the Earth will be uninhabitable? That […]
Frances is an awful human being, so self-absorbed that when she finds her despised husband unexpectedly home and unexpectedly dead, she grabs the suitcase that she had popped in to get and continues on to her ski weekend. I’d hate her if she weren’t so entertaining. Until recently, she was wealthy, envied, and feared. Now […]
