Apr 18, 2024
Review of The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
I was intrigued by the post-World War II repercussions on small-town Minnesota and by the dark secrets coming to light, but found myself...
Apr 11, 2024
Review of Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
Emily Habeck's debut novel offers an unusual premise in which one member of a newlywed couple begins transforming into a great white...
Apr 9, 2024
Review of The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
Katherine Arden, author of the captivating Winternight trilogy, here shares a mysterious, haunting historical fiction story with a...
Mar 28, 2024
Review of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
The tone of Martyr! was tough for me to get a handle on for much of the book. The story is dark, nerve-racking, irreverent, tragic, and...
Mar 26, 2024
Review of Together for Never by Marilyn Kaye
Marilyn Kaye's middle-grade novel explores eighth-grade opposites' struggle to find common ground when their single parents begin dating...
Mar 20, 2024
Review of The Women by Kristin Hannah
Hannah offers a meaty story about Vietnam and the nurses who served there, suffered, and were largely forgotten or denied; this storyline...
Mar 7, 2024
Review of After Annie by Anna Quindlen
Young mom Annie's abrupt death leaves her four children, husband, and best friend reeling. Each of them must find a way back to...
Nov 14, 2023
Review of Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Angie Kim's sophomore novel is a mystery, but Happiness Falls is primarily an exploration of a complicated, loving, messy family and each...
Nov 8, 2023
Review of They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies that Raised Us by Prachi Gupta
In her memoir, Gupta explores the stressful, tragic disconnect between the "perfect minority" image her father demanded of the family and...
Nov 2, 2023
Review of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh's debut novel is a space opera about war, duty, brainwashing, escaping limitations, and reinventing oneself--with fascinating...
Oct 26, 2023
Review of The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young
June struggles with the complicated implications of her family's curse of hallucinations and mental illness...until she realizes that the...
Oct 25, 2023
Review of Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Starling House is another wonderful, dark, twisty story from Alix E. Harrow, with imperfect characters, a noble, messy quest, layers of...
Oct 19, 2023
Review of Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
In Evil Eye, Etaf Rum (author of A Woman Is No Man) considers a small-town North Carolina artist, mother, and wife struggling with the...
Oct 12, 2023
Review of The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins
Emi, Kristina, and Larch are a family that survived the immense destruction of the climate crisis, but secrets, danger, and a double life...
Oct 5, 2023
Review of Homecoming by Kate Morton
Morton's newest historical fiction involves two timelines, a decades-old tragedy, and a modern-day descendant's discovery of her family's...
Sep 26, 2023
Review of Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison
The slim novel Blue Hour explores ambivalence about motherhood, unflinching details of the experience of miscarriage, relationship...
Sep 12, 2023
Review of Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki
Lepucki's strange, interesting time-travel novel centers around betrayal, broken hearts, second chances, and the power of hate--and of...
Aug 30, 2023
Review of The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman
I was taken with the first half of this book--a rural cult, a teen mother, a strong female protagonist in an impossible situation,...
Aug 24, 2023
Review of This House Is Not a Home by Katlia
Katlia's story is based on actual events, detailing the displacement of Indigenous people and the devastating consequences of greed, the...
Aug 16, 2023
Review of Fourth Wing (The Empyrean #1) by Rebecca Yarros
The first in this dragon rider series by Yarros is full of dramaaaaatic teen angst, a cutthroat path to becoming a warrior, bucking...