Never Have I Ever

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…

Continue reading

Still Life

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…

Continue reading

11/22/63

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…

Continue reading

11/22/63

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…

Continue reading

This House of Sky

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…

Continue reading

Thunderstruck

Erik Larson |  NonfictionThunderstruck, the interwoven stories of Guglielmo Marconi, credited with the invention of the wireless, and Hawley Crippen, a physician, perhaps eventual murderer, isn’t Dead Wake or Devil in the White City.  I was disappointed that the narrative lacked a strong sense of mystery and urgency. Thunderstruck read more like history than narrative…

Continue reading