by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 25, 2022 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Mad Honey is a compulsively readable novel by two of my favorite authors, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan. It’s about two single moms in small-town Adams, New Hampshire, and their high school-age kids. Olivia is a beekeeper and entrepreneur. Her son Asher is...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Nov 14, 2021 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Gold Diggers by Sanjina Sathian is two parts a story about children of Indian immigrants balancing tradition with assimilation. It’s one part a history, with a nod to alternative histories. And it’s another part of magical realism that draws on cultural traditions,...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 16, 2020 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
In the debut novel from Rachel Mans McKenny, The Butterfly Effect, Greta Oto is more a spiny caterpillar than beautiful butterfly. Even though she’s an entomology graduate student, specializing in the winged creatures. She’s not socially comfortable in most...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 24, 2020 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Bernardine Evaristo writes a prose poetic novel, honoring a wide-ranging group of black British women in her 2019 book Girl, Woman, Other. The women represent many walks of life, various generations, and diverse personalities. They connect with each other, but the...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Oct 4, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Laurie Frankel brings us inside a raucous and somewhat unconventional Wisconsin family in This Is How It Always Is. Rosie and Penn, respectively a doctor and a writer, are the parents of four boys when she gets pregnant again. Every time she’s expecting they hope for...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 18, 2019 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
In A Ladder to the Sky, John Boyne and his main character, Maurice Swift, take us inside the world of a writer. And a sociopath. It’s so completely wrong that it’s right. This is the follow up to Boyne’s fabulous 2017 book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies....
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 13, 2019 | MISCELLANEOUS
After some long books in May, I decided to catch up on some shorter books. In my Audible collection, that means listening to a few Audible Originals. And finally Audible let’s you sort your titles by length, which makes it much easier to manage via time. Instead...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jun 10, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Lindsey Lee Johnson takes readers deep inside the high school ecosystem in The Most Dangerous Place on Earth. Actually, the first chapter occurs in eighth grade, but the remainder are during high school. Her main characters are students, and one first-year...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 19, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Pickle’s Progress is a quintessential modern New York City novel. In it, Marcia Butler gives us identical twin brothers and the women in their lives. But it’s much more dysfunctional and convoluted than that. Fundamentally, that’s a good thing. Butler’s taut...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | May 8, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
There There by Tommy Orange wasn’t the book I’d hoped it would be. Where Heart Berries was a deep dive in one woman’s psyche, There There is a shallow dip into the lives of many, many characters. That they both center on the varied experiences of Native Americans in...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 16, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Gregory Erich Phillips takes on a main character very different from himself in The Exile. First, Leila del Sol is a woman. Second, she’s a Colombian immigrant living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. But they both work in the chaotic bubble-bursting mortgage loan...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 4, 2019 | RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
Delia Owens crafts a genrebusting debut novel. It’s primarily a Bildungsroman—coming of age story. But Owens throws in elements of romance, adds a treatise on nature, plus a strong mystery and courtroom procedural.Her main character Kathryn Danielle Clark, nicknamed...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 25, 2019 | RELAX: Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
Ghost Gifts from author Laura Spinella was a good balance for my recent more serious reads. But it wasn’t much more than a fluff piece. Main character Aubrey Ellis is a journalist, working on real estate features at a small town paper. She’s also a medium, willingly...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 14, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Taylor Jenkins Reid creates an iconic—and entirely fictional—band in Daisy Jones & The Six. It’s set in the wild and wooly 1970s in California. Daisy is everybody’s spoiled little sister, and a singer songwriter. The band is six musicians trying to collectively...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 12, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
Bel Canto, published in 2001 by Ann Patchett, is a melodic story of an extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome. It’s an elegant and meaningful exposition of kidnapping, but also of love. A group of businessmen, diplomats, and important people gather in an unnamed...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jan 17, 2019 | RELAX: Other Relaxation
In Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver mixes two story lines chapter by chapter. The first focuses on Willa Knox and her present-day family. The second focuses on Thatcher Greenwood, who lived in the same neighborhood as Willa in the 1870s. Both are faced with...
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