Rachel Mans McKenny: The Butterfly Effect is a Stellar Debut (Book Review)
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...Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
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...Book Review: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
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...Book Review: A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
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....Four Audible Originals: A Combined Review
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...Book Review: The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson
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...Book Review: Pickle’s Progress by Marcia Butler
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...Book Review: There There by Tommy Orange
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...Book Review: The Exile by Gregory Erich Phillips
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...Book Review: Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
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...Book Review: Ghost Gifts by Laura Spinella
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...Book Review: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
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...Book Review: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
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...Book Review: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
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...Book Review: Paris Time Capsule by Ella Carey
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....Bookshop.Org Affiliate
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