by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 23, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Author Lauren Willig just didn’t deliver what I hoped for in The English Wife. It’s historical fiction and mystery, set in The Gilded Age of New York City, Newport, Rhode Island and country houses. The Van Duyvil family is “old money,” having come to America from...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 5, 2020 | LEARN: Everything Else
Stacy Schiff looks for hidden details about the world’s most famous female monarch in Cleopatra: A Life. And, believe me, those details hide among gobs of information about the men she loved. In order to tell Cleopatra’s life, Schiff really tells the stories of Caesar...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 5, 2020 | LEARN: Medical Memoir
Casey Schwartz writes a memoir and social history mash up in Attention, A Love Story. She’s a thirty-something woman who started using Adderal, a drug to treat ADHD, in college. But she took it without being diagnosed. It’s just one of those things college kids do,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 1, 2020 | RELAX: Memoir
Maggie Nelson and Harry Dodge have a non traditional family, while doing common things like struggling to get pregnant and raising two children together. In her memoir, The Argonauts, Nelson explores the unique aspects of their lives. At the same time, she discusses...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 2, 2019 | LEARN: Everything Else
Massoud Hayoun combines two shorter books into one with his debut nonfiction, When We Were Arabs. It’s a family memoir, a political history, and a commentary. He uses his own family’s experience, primarily that of his maternal grandparents, to illustrate a wide...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 12, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
The Final Days of Magic is my last shot at the New Orleans Witches series. And I’ve discovered that none of the characters matter very much to me. Even if author J.D. Horn writes another book in the series, I won’t be following along. I’m disappointed to be leaving...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 8, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Jeffrey Ford wants to give his readers a creature feature, haunted house story in The Twilight Pariah. He also wants it to be quirky and funny, by virtue of the odd trio of college students involved. Problem is, it just fell flat for me. Not scary, and not especially...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 13, 2019 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
In The Paragon Hotel, Lyndsay Faye brings us a character nicknamed Nobody. She’s actually Alice James, but is skilled at disappearing into the corner of a room or a street. She uses some disguise, but mostly changes voices and attitudes to blend in. It’s a skill she...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 1, 2019 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
This was my first venture into the Aimée Leduc series from Cara Black. So, I started with book one and took an armchair trip to the neighborhood in Paris called the Marais. Aimée is the owner of a small private detective agency in Paris. She’s the daughter of a French...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 12, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Like imaginative authors everywhere, Ella Carey based Paris Time Capsule on a real-life occurrence. In late 2010, a Paris apartment that had been uninhabited for 70 years was opened after its owner’s death. She had left Paris during World War II and never returned....
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 17, 2018 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
I feel sorry for author David Lagercrantz, who wrote the fourth book in the Millennium series. The Girl in the Spider’s Web is just an okay thriller. But Lagercrantz could never live up to the trilogy created by Stieg Larsson, who died at just 50 years old. The story...
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