Blake Crouch | Fiction 2019 I learned a new phrase in reading about Recursion, “speculative fiction”. The book opens on November 2, 2018, when Detective Barry Sutton arrives to the 41st floor of a New York City skyscraper and attempts to stop the suicide of a woman whose legs are dangling over the edge. Ann Voss…
Melissa Albert | Fiction 2018 Alice Crewe Proserpine is seventeen and lives with her mother Ella as nomads, moving from place to place around the country for all her life. She never understood why there was constant upheaval, and why she lived in studio apartments, or converted barns, or someone’s couch, or other unsavory places…
Joshilyn Jackson | Fiction 2019 The story opens at a neighborhood book club. Suddenly the woman renting the Air B&B down the street, Angelica Roux, knocks on the door and decides she is going to join. Pouring excessive amounts of alcohol for all who are in attendance (none of which does she contribute), powerful Roux…
Margaret Atwood | Fiction 2019 It is 15 years after the events recorded in The Handmaid’s Tale and not all is well in Gilead! This is the story of the demise of Gilead, as told through the eyes of three women who lived it. Two were young women. One grew up in Gilead as the…
Louise Penny | Fiction 2005 Three Pines is a remote village south of Montreal. It is a tiny and peaceful hamlet, where everyone knows everyone. Early one Sunday morning during hunting season, an important elderly community member, Jane Neal, is found dead in the woods, with a lethal wound from an arrow. We meet Chief…
Jonathon Evison | FictionThis is just a bit of a reluctant four hearts, but still closer to 4 than 3! Benjamin Benjamin has just trained as a caregiver, and begins working with Trevor, a young man with Muscular Dystrophy. No surprise, their relationship is challenging, but a strong bond does grow. There are two interwoven…
Steven King | FictionJake Epping, a reluctant time traveler, travels to September 9, 1958, multiple times to prevent the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Of course, the butterfly effect causes changes in the present-day world (2011) and the past is “obdurate” and not wanting to change. As a result, Jake must come back home…
Steven King | FictionJake Epping, a reluctant time traveler, travels to September 9, 1958, multiple times to prevent the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Of course, the butterfly effect causes changes in the present-day world (2011) and the past is “obdurate” and not wanting to change. As a result, Jake must come back home…
Ivan Doig | Nonfiction/MemoirDoig is a stunning, beautiful writer! Here’s one example from page 16; you can find such examples on most every page. “School struck me as the kind of job where you weren’t allowed to do anything; I had free time in my head by the dayfull, and spent it all in being…
Bill Clinton & James Patterson | FictionAh, I breathe a sigh of relief after the last James Patterson I read (see my review on Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas) This is James Patterson back at his best. Just enough complexity and intrigue; a page turner near the end; relationships that have soul and heart; a vivid…