Malcolm Kempt

Fiction 2026 / 272 pages

When A Gift Before Dying opens, it is -31degrees in the town of Cape Dorset, population 1100 Inuit and 200 Qalllunaaq, or non-Inuit, in The Arctic Circle. 

The author Kempt viscerally and astonishingly pulls you into the unbearable cold, from explaining how a hunter lays on the ice, waiting for the seal to return to its air hole (a seal can hold its breath for an hour!), to dog-fur mitts, wind chill hitting at 100 below, frost bitten toes.  Clearly, he has lived in the Arctic, not just done his research.  This is not a sea and surf environment!

Cape Dorset has one of the highest crime rates in North America, rampant drug usage, lack of treatment resources, and isolation. Violence is the answer to most all problems.  The children and teens of Cape Dorset are violent, unkind, self-centered and non-compassionate, and the adults are only worse.

In A Gift Before Dying by Malcolm Kempt, apparitions and ghostly visitations blur the line between standard police procedure and a supernatural thriller. The deceased teenage girl, Pitseolala, appears as an eerie presence to both the disgraced policeman Elderick Cole and her younger brother Maliktu, driving them with a shared mission to find the reason for her suicide, or, as we soon realize, her killer.

The mystery is the plot line that carries us through the book, but I would not call this book a mystery.  It is much more of a suspense tale of the environment and the community.  Spiritual realism permeates the novel, grounded in the Inuit history of story, passed down through generations.  

The novel weaves visitations from the dead girl together with the characters' trauma, grief, and self-medication, leaving it ambiguous whether they face literal ghosts or psychological hallucinations.  I wondered how much of the apparitions were drug-induced, as everyone is medicated.

I cannot fully recommend A Gift Before Dying.  Though I found it an excellently written debut novel, with complex characters and a vivid landscape, it is dark, gritty, violent, depressing.  You just have to be in the mood for it and ready to choose it intelligently!  It is not a fun, delightful read, though I read it in two days.

AUGUST 2026

SPOILER ALERT.  DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.  In the final chapter, as he succumbs to his wounds he suffered during a fight with Pitseolala’s killer, he enters a spiritual iglu. There, he finds Pitseolala who takes his hand and blows out the flames of her lamp. It is a peaceful, spiritual ending that elevates the book to a profound meditation on the Arctic soul.

Franklon Dixon

Fiction 1927

I was reading an article about mystery and suspense novels which mentioned The Hardy Boys, and I harkened back to when I was 10, 11, 12 (?) and reading every Hardy Boys book.  So, I thought, "What the heck.  It is the dog days of summer.  I think I will reread a bit of my youth."

And so I  read the first three Hardy Boys books:

The Tower Treasure (1927)

The House on the Cliff (1927)

The Secret of the Old Mill (1927)

It was serious fun!  What I noticed first is the vastly different character style from what I read today.  Those who read my blog regularly know that I am a stickler for well-developed characters and plots.  All we know about the Hardy boys is that Frank is 18 with dark hair and his brother Joe is a 17-year-old blond.  We know nothing else, really.  No deep context about their lives or characters.

The other big noticing I have is the writing style.  Every sentence is short and crisp and either shows action, quick dialogue, or occasionally an internal thought.  They are, after all, young adult books.  And I enjoy the suspense still!

I recommend this exercise!  Not to go read three Hardy Boys books, but to read a book or two from that time frame in your life and notice what you notice.  Perhaps for you it was Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 

Tell us here what you discover!

August 2026

Robert Dugoni

Fiction 2018 | 428 pages

The year is 1955 and baby Sam Hill has just been born to Madeline and Max Hill. All is going well until Sam opens his eyes.  Brown eyes have a lot of pigment.  Blue eyes have little, and the range between creates green, hazel, gray.  Sam has red eyes.  No one in the medical community has seen this before, and no one knows what to do.

Not surprisingly, red eyes serve as a deterrent to Sam making friends.  He is called "Devil Boy" at school, and is ostracized, isolated, and bullied, especially by the psychopath Daniel Bateman. We follow him as he travels the challenging journey to adulthood, buoyed mostly by his very religious, loving, kind, perceptive mother.

Soon Sam meets Ernie ... a new boy at school, and the only Black.  They become fast friends.  And later he meets Mickie, strong, outspoken, her own woman/girl, who also becomes his friend and eventually his partner in the ophthalmology clinic they open together.  

This coming of age story is very much in the context of Our Lady of Mercy, in Burlingame.  Our Lady of Mercy offers the elementary school Adam goes to, the hospital in which he is born, and the church his mom goes to.  This is particularly poignant for me because I attended Our Lady of Mercy high school in Farmington, Michigan.

All in all, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell (yes, Sam Hell becomes the nickname of Sam Hill) is a delicious, yummy read.  It is a feel-good book, and is entertains throughout.  I truly reccomend The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell for your reading pleasure.

August 2026

Liz Moore

Fiction 2020 | 480 pages

Mickey (Michaela) Fitzpatrick is the star of One Bright River.  She is a beat cop in Kensington, a less desirable location in Philadelphia.  This is a part of Philly where people go to get heroine, OxyContin, and numerous other drugs.  They wander the streets, the abandoned houses and storefronts in search of their next fix. Addiction and its deleterious effects are brutally on the pages of One Bright River.  Not surprisingly, this is also a part of the city where prostitutes hang on every corner.  Mickey tries to protect the most vulnerable of these sad people, and faces an uphill battle.  Four young women are murdered on her watch over a period of a few weeks.

Mickey’s younger sister Kacey lives among the people of these neighborhoods.  Of course, she has tried to get healthy and off the drugs many times, but it never lasts long.  Mickey has not told  many people that she attempts to keep an eye out for her sister while she does her police job.

Mickey and Kacey are estranged.  Still, it seems it has been too long since Mickey saw Kacey, even from a distance, and begins a private search for her.  She seems to have gone missing.  In this novel, we search for Kacey, as well as whoever is perpetrating murder.

The storyline moves back and forth between “Then” and “Now.”  “Then” is about the close and loving relationship Mickey and Kacey had as children, despite challenging circumstances.  “Now” is about Mickey out on the streets, doing her job, and trying to care for her four-year-old son, Thomas.

Long Bright River is a well-written suspense novel. I enjoyed it immensely and recommend it highly.  Mickey and the other characters have depth, personality, values, morals, quirks, proclivities.  Liz Moore is an excellent writer of the genre.  She keeps you turning the page.

July 2026

Kirsten Miller

Fiction 2024| 296 pages

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books is quirky. Perhaps implausible.  One-third of the way into this book, I read some reviews. Two reviewers describe this book as hilarious satire.  I missed this completely..  I found it very choppy and disjointed. Plus, there are 24 characters, making it challenging to follow.  I do not read humor in it at all. I did not giggle once.  

Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books — none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.  But she has not read any of them.

But Beverly’s daughter Lindsay sneaks in by night and secretly fills Lula Dean’s little free library with banned books wrapped in “wholesome” dust jackets. The Girl’s Guide to the Revolution is wrapped in the cover of The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette. A jacket that belongs to Our Confederate Heroes ends up on Beloved. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.

That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. It’s a diverse and surprising bunch — including the local postman, the prom queen, housewives, a farmer, and the former DA — all of whom have been changed by what they’ve read. When Lindsay is forced to own up to what she’s done, the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town and change it forever.  

The second half of the plot really centers around a statue of Augustus Wainwright in the town square (in front of a town landmark.  Through a series of events, especially among the young people in town, people discover that Augustus, a slaveholder in his day, is Beverly’s great great great great great (four?) grandfather, which begins to explain why there are so many Blacks living in this southern bastion.

I cannot recommend Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. It us not terribly well-written and is simply a rather bizarre story.

July 2026

Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction 1993/ 343 pages

After finishing The Bean Trees, I immediately read the sequel, Pigs in Heaven. I didn't like it nearly as much.  It picks up three years later, with the topic of how to arrange Turtle's legal adoption. given the morals and norms of the Cherokee nation.  A lot of the book takes place with Alice, Turtle's grandmother, on Cherokee land.

I missed Lou Ann and preferred to read about the child characters versus adults.

However, it is still Barbara Kingsolver, and she is an astounding writer.  I particularly enjoyed characters like Cash who is fascinated with weed birds ... what he calls pigeons ... and wants them killed off; and Lucky Buster, who has mental retardation and can't really tell home from the outside world and disappears often.  Kingsolver presented fascinating insight into the Cherokee tribe.

It is worth reading this sequel, I was just a bit unenthused.

July 2026

Constance Helmericks

Memoir 1969/ 303 pages

I kept thinking it was coming, but when I turned to page 124 and started chapter 8, all the air left me and I collapsed like a spent balloon and realized I could not go on.  I SO wanted to like this book, recommended by a friend.  The author talks extensively about the geography, the river, their camps, all the mud from big floods, people they meet along the way.  This is a memoir.  The author, Constance Hemericks, took her daughters, Ann (12) and Jean (14) up the Peace River to the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole (yes, the Peace River flows north) in summer, 1964.  Such an adventure!

However I ended my journey because ALL she writes about is the geography and writes very little about the three women.  I don't read about their personalities, their emotions.  I wanted to know what happened when the hair curlers floated to the top of the canoe.  I wanted to know about their periods and if they synced.  I wanted to know how they dealt with trash.  I wanted to know what was in the mail when they received a bundle.   I wanted to know how Constance dealt with loosing her shoe in the mud and if she really wet barefoot. Or what they ate for breakfast.  Or how they bear-proofed their food stash.  Or any teenage angst.  These sort of daily acts of living were not included in the writing.  How disappointing!  For me, she misses a very important part of the story.  In some ways, the essence of her memoir.

Unfortunately, I do not recommend Down the Wild River North.

And so I am moving on to whatever is next on my shelf.

July 2026