Books. Food. Comfort. Culture.
Icons by Margaret Stohl – Though I had high hopes for Margaret Stohl’s YA novel about teens who discover they hold the key to ridding the Earth of a deadly alien invasion, it was disappointing in the long run. The story is an inventive one and while I enjoyed the premise, the plot lagged in [...]
The Smart One centers around Weezy Coffey, a house wife and mostly stay at home mom who, along with her husband has successfully raised three children – Martha, Claire and Max. As a child Weezy’s mom had always called her “the smart one”, while thinking that her sister Maureen was “the pretty one” who would [...]
Combining the stories of a research assignment undertaken by desperate scholar and recovering alcoholic Annie Kendall and the preoccupations of sixteenth-century Carthusian monks, Bristol House is fast-paced, conspiracy-driven historical fiction of the best kind. Swerling’s ghost story provides illumination on Thomas Cromwell’s dealing with the church while linking it to modern-day religious politics in this excellently researched [...]
Fear in The Sunlight is Nicola Upton’s fourth novel in her mystery series featuring Josephine Tey, the pseudonym of famed mystery writer Elizabeth McCammon. When it opens, the Tey has recently died from cancer, and her good friend Chief Detective Archie Penrose, still in the midst of his grief, is asked to reexamine a series of gruesome murders that [...]
Amity & Sorrow propels readers through the collision of a lonely farmer and a woman on the run from a failed communal experiment—her fearful and reluctant teenage daughters in tow. Riley deftly explores the bonds and boundaries of love, faith, and responsibility when passionate and well-intentioned ideals stray far from their origins in this emotionally fraught [...]