2021-04-21 07:00
Former Chicago PD officer Cal Hooper has moved to a small Irish town to decompress. Fat chance. No sooner has he started working on his fixer-upper than a 13-year-old named Trey… Read More
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2021-04-14 07:00
I hate to pan any book with a central theme of suicide, but the writing style of this book seems intended for a sixth grade audience. The prose is choppy, and the plot, aside from the… Read More
2021-04-07 07:00
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old girl in rural Nigeria. Her mother’s death basically robs Adunni of her education and her independence, as her alcoholic father sees her brideprice a… Read More
2021-03-31 07:30
Patti Smith’s music was mostly not mainstream enough to appear on my radar, but this memoir garnered a lot of attention and accolades when it came out. Her rags-to-riches story i… Read More
2021-03-24 07:00
Against the backdrop of Woodstock, the moon landing, civil rights, Vietnam, Chappaquiddick, and the feminist movement, the women in this novel are anything but feminist. Blair is pregn… Read More
2021-03-17 07:00
This novel may be a little too clever for me. It contains three sections, and I had to reread the third in order to determine how the Kafkaesque middle section related to the other two… Read More
2021-03-10 08:00
This novel opens with the abduction of two young girls, age 8 and 11, but the subsequent chapters are just as compelling, the most gripping of which involves the disappearance of a beloved d… Read More
2021-03-03 08:00
The author has changed the name of the place, but this novel is based on an actual boys’ reform school in Florida that finally closed in 2011. Set in the Jim Crow era, this book… Read More
2021-02-28 23:09
In this novel there are two competing factions of elevator inspectors—the Empiricists and the Intuitionists. The Empiricists examine the machinery visually, whereas the Intuition… Read More
2021-02-24 08:00
Isidore Auberon is a good man who dies too young, leaving behind two young sons and a heartbroken wife. Leo is the older of the sons and the main subject of this novel. He is muc… Read More
2021-02-17 08:00
Ayad Akhtar blurs the line here between memoir and fiction, and I have no idea which parts of this novel are true. The writing is superb, and Akhtar gives us a peak into the soul of an… Read More
2021-02-10 08:00
I read Doctor Zhivagoin preparation for reading this novel about author Boris Pasternak. However, that step really was not necessary. I did not love Pasternak’s novel, and… Read More
2021-02-07 23:24
What’s with Russian authors and characters committing suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train? In this case, the suicide is that of the title character’s father… Read More
2021-02-03 08:30
The Adler family is moving from New York to Los Angeles, but their plane crashes en route. After the initial jolt that this book delivers, it bogs down a bit. Twelve-year-old Edd… Read More
2021-01-27 08:00
Candace Chen is one of the few New York survivors—so far—of a deadly pandemic caused by a fungus. This novel has a before-and-after timeline. In the present, Candace… Read More
2021-01-20 08:00
A Kate Atkinson spy novel? What’s not to love? Plucky eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong interviews for a job in 1940 as a typist for MI5. Her interviewer asks her wh… Read More
2021-01-18 22:50
I am a huge fan of the Jackson Brodie novels, and, although I enjoyed this one, I did not think it was as good as the previous two. There’s just not enough Brodie and witty bante… Read More
2021-01-17 22:52
I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, but her other stuff, not so much. This novel is narrated by Ruby Lennox and charts her life from conception, no less. It also… Read More
2021-01-13 08:00
I have mixed feelings about this novel and not just about its authenticity. I certainly have no legitimate knowledge of the Mexican-American experience. This book opens with a ma… Read More
2021-01-06 08:00
I would expect a certain amount of confusion when reading a book about four generations of women, and there is that. The narrator is fourth-generation Isadora, but her grandmother and… Read More
2020-12-30 09:00
Brian and Anne Stanhope live next door to Francis and Lena Gleeson. Soon it becomes apparent that Anne is unstable. Her son Peter and the Gleeson’s youngest daughter Kate a… Read More
2020-12-23 08:00
I would classify this book as a western but more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian than Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. For me, it lacks heart. Each cha… Read More
2020-12-18 22:31
I am not sure that Pride and Prejudice needs a sequel, but P.D. James has undertaken to write one, and I am all in. Darcy and Elizabeth are all settled at Pemberley with two sons, and… Read More
2020-12-17 21:59
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland joins a childless couple for a month in the town of Bath. There she soon attracts two suitors—the delightful and handsome Henry Tilney and th… Read More
2020-12-16 23:01
Longbourn is the name of the Bennet estate in Pride and Prejudice. Jo Baker’s novel has the same setting but focuses on the servants, particularly Sarah, a teenage housemaid.&nbs&hell…Read More
2020-12-15 22:59
I like Jane Austen, but, honestly, the flowery nineteenth-century language causes me to have to reread too many passages. There are those passages, however, that are worth reading mult… Read More
2020-12-14 20:56
When I first began reading this book, I found it to be frivolous and concluded that perhaps transporting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to 21stcentury America was not such a great i… Read More
2020-12-09 19:30
My expectations for this book were too high. I know it’s probably not PC to say this, but I thought Phillip Roth’s similarly themed The Human Stain was better. It is… Read More
2020-12-02 08:00
I liked the idea of this novel a lot more than I liked the novel itself. I even reread Huckleberry Finn so that the storyline would be familiar. The author here builds a colorful… Read More
2020-11-30 23:01
The Southern dialect dialog keeps this picaresque classic from being a fast read, and I think now it might work better as an audiobook. Still, I plodded my way through and enjoyed the… Read More
2020-11-25 08:00
One thing that annoyed me about this novel was the author’s overuse of the word “ranged” or “ranging.” She uses “range” as a verb twenty times… Read More
2020-11-18 08:00
Teenage girls who seek abortions are imprisoned, and abortionists face the death penalty. This novel gives us a glimpse into the lives of four women in the not so distant future after… Read More
2020-11-11 08:00
Hiram Walker is a young slave on a Virginia tobacco plantation in the mid-1800s. His white father owns the plantation and positions Hiram to be the manservant of Hiram’s white ha… Read More
2020-11-04 08:00
Yoel Blum is a well-known Israeli writer who returns to Amsterdam, the city of his birth, to research a novel about his past. We know that his mother Sonia escaped the Holocaust with h… Read More
2020-10-27 20:51
Myriam, has returned to work as a lawyer for the usual reason: her two small children have totally usurped her life. Now she has gone to the opposite extreme, in which she works late h… Read More
2020-10-21 07:00
Justin Savile is a police detective in the town of Hillston, NC. He also has a law degree, is a descendant of the family who owns the local textile mill, and has done two tours of duty… Read More
2020-10-18 20:56
Books that are supposed to be funny often strike me as not that funny, or, at the other extreme, just plain silly. This book falls into the latter category and came across to me as alm… Read More
2020-10-14 07:00
This is my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s books featuring Raylan Givens, and it is basically a sequel to Pronto. Harry Arno, retired bookie, is back in this one, as is Harry’… Read More
2020-10-13 21:28
Harry Arno, a Miami Beach bookie, has given Raylan Givens, U.S. Marshall, the slip twice. Raylan makes a deal with Harry’s bail bondsman and follows Harry to Italy with the inten… Read More
2020-10-12 21:42
This is not my favorite Elmore Leonard novel, but it was a fast read, fast-paced, and not intellectually demanding. The title character is Bob Gibbs, a smarmy Circuit Court judge in Pa… Read More
2020-10-11 20:39
An Elmore Leonard novel never fails to entertain, and this is no exception. You can savor the clever dialog or just race through to the finish like I did. Vincent Mora is a Miami… Read More
2020-10-07 07:00
If you draw a line through the center of a tree stump, your trajectory will basically match the timeline of this book, from the present, then back by decades into the past, then coming back… Read More
2020-09-30 07:00
This book is just too long. Even if its length were halved, it would still be 450 pages, and I might be OK with that. It reminds me a lot of Shantaram, another too-long book set… Read More
2020-09-23 07:00
Lillian is going to work for her rich friend Madison as a sort of governess to Madison’s two 10-year-old twin stepchildren—a boy and a girl. Their mother has died (her death is… Read More
2020-09-20 21:44
Izzy is a pregnant teenager, and the father of her unborn child is the high school art teacher, Hal. Izzy wants to have the baby, with or without Hal’s support, and she comes to… Read More
2020-09-16 10:30
Maddie Schwartz is ready to leave her husband in 1966. To her surprise, her teenage son elects to live with his dad. Maddie charges on, though, and strikes out on her own. … Read More
2020-09-13 20:30
Tess Monaghan is not the most talented fictional private investigator. In this case she has a lot of help from a former Toll Facilities cop named Carl Dewitt, who had the misfortune of… Read More
2020-09-09 10:30
Mickey Fitzpatrick is a Philadelphia cop who shutters each time she gets a call to the scene of a dead woman. It could be her missing sister, Kacey, who has struggled with drug addicti… Read More
2020-09-02 10:00
Kit’s sister Josie has been dead for fifteen years. Or at least that’s what Kit thinks until she sees Josie on a news clip from New Zealand. Kit takes off for Aucklan… Read More
2020-08-26 10:00
Big Angel and Little Angel are half-brothers, and they are together in San Diego for Big Angel’s mother’s funeral. Big Angel is planning to have a 70thbirthday party the ne… Read More
2020-08-19 10:30
Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie are back in action as private investigators. A beautiful woman named Desiree Stone, daughter of mega-wealthy Trevor Stone, has gone missing. &hell…Read More
2020-08-16 21:17
There is no such thing as a bad Dennis Lehane novel, although I did like its predecessor, ADrink Before the War, better than this one. Angie and Patrick are called into action again wh… Read More
2020-08-12 10:00
If you pay attention to the chapter headings, you can easily keep up with the three timelines in this novel, but I still found the content to be a little hazy. The three main character… Read More
2020-08-05 10:30
This may not be a mystery novel, but the storyline does revolve around Jacy’s disappearance in 1971. She and three guys, all head-over-heels in love with her—Mickey, Teddy… Read More
2020-08-02 21:49
Annie is a divorced thirty-something in the small town of Mohawk, NY. Her son Randall is as smart as a whip but finds that he is more popular if he doesn’t make straight A’… Read More
2020-07-29 16:36
Donna Tartt crafts each sentence so meticulously that it’s no wonder she writes only one book every ten years. This novel takes place in the fictional town of Alexandria, Mississ… Read More
2020-07-22 10:30
It’s the 1930s, and Alice’s marriage is a sham. She and her husband Bennett live in the same house as Bennett’s father, who owns a coal mine in rural Kentucky. … Read More
2020-07-15 10:00
This book may not be as great as its main character, but it is still pretty great. I am not a history buff, but Erik Larson always makes historical narratives enthralling by adding per… Read More
2020-07-12 20:26
Isaac Cline is the Isaac in the title of this terrific book about the Galveston hurricane of 1900. His hubris makes him an anti-hero, but he is not half as bad as his superiors in the… Read More
2020-07-08 10:30
Danny Conroy may be the first-person narrator of this book (I’m always little thrown off by male first-person narrators of books penned by female authors), but the house in the title c… Read More
2020-07-05 20:55
This book was such a delight that it made me want to downgrade all the other books I’ve read lately. It also made me want to hug my loved ones as close to me as possible. … Read More
2020-07-01 10:30
I’m not sure which is worse—living through a pandemic where you could die or one in which everyone goes blind. Well, almost everyone. One character claims to be blind… Read More
2020-06-28 21:56
Almost everyone in the world has died from radiation poisoning after a massive nuclear war. Pockets of people still remain in the Southern Hemisphere, but the cloud of radiation is com… Read More
2020-06-24 10:30
Hiro is a young seaman, half Japanese and half American, who dives overboard near the coast of a Georgia island. A tony writer’s retreat on the island becomes his safe haven for… Read More
2020-06-17 10:30
Someone has murdered an elderly Swedish farmer in a most grisly fashion, and his wife is hanging on by a thread after having had a noose tightened around her neck. The only word she ca… Read More
2020-06-10 10:30
At first I thought this book was just about gambling—obsession with gambling, gambling in secret, guilt over gambling, and passing judgment on gambling. However, about halfway th… Read More
2020-06-03 10:30
I certainly hope this book is semi-autobiographical, because it has no plot. It’s the story of Francie Nolan’s childhood in the early 20th century. Her father drinks… Read More
2020-05-27 10:30
The friend in the title could be a Great Dane named Apollo, or it could be the narrator’s writer friend—a man who has recently committed suicide. The dog belonged to the wr… Read More
2020-05-20 10:30
Now seemed like a good time to read a really long book, and I’m so glad I chose this one. I laughed, I cried, and I lay in bed thinking about it even after I had put it down for… Read More
2020-05-13 10:30
Lucius is a young medical student in Austria when WWI breaks out. He enlists and finds himself as the only doctor in a makeshift hospital in a church in the Carpathian Mountains… Read More
2020-05-10 22:21
This book is extremely reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, including a river trip to meet up with a man with an outsized reputation. The British colony this time is Burma… Read More
2020-05-06 10:00
This book is not a page-turner per se, but I found it to be completely addictive. It’s a classic story of two teenagers who don’t move in the same social circles but become… Read More
2020-04-29 10:00
I prefer Scandinavian mysteries, with colorful and sometimes perverted characters, but this is an English mystery, and most of the characters are subdued and buttoned up. There’s… Read More
2020-04-22 10:30
The writing and grammar in this book in the first 25 pages was so bad that I wished for a CliffsNotes version. “Had began”? “Mired by politics” instead of… Read More
2020-04-15 10:30
This novel, published in 1940, is about a man on the run during a purge of priests in Mexico in the 1930s. The hunted man is known as the “whisky priest” because he has a s… Read More
2020-04-08 10:30
Alice Hoffman weaves her signature magical realism into this WWII novel without making it seem too frivolous. In Berlin, Hanni is desperate to get her 12-yer-old daughter Lea to Paris… Read More
2020-04-01 10:30
This is my first Jo Nesbo thriller, and I found it to be a little challenging. Not only are the Norwegian names sometimes hard to keep up with, but as each section ends and another beg… Read More
2020-03-25 10:30
In the late 1700s in Bern, Switzerland, Marie Groholtz’s father has died, and her mother has taken a housekeeping job with Philippe Curtius. Dr. Curtius models human organs out o… Read More
2020-03-18 10:30
This is one of those books where each time I picked it up I struggled to remember what it was about. An Irishman, Maurice, in his 80s, is addressing his son Kevin with the story of his… Read More
2020-03-11 10:30
At the beginning of the 20th century, in Salford, Mass., Bertha Truitt is apparently beamed out of nowhere into a snow-covered cemetery, with 15 pounds of gold on her person. Never do… Read More
2020-03-04 11:30
James and Charles become joint pastors and close friends at a Presbyterian church in Greenwich Village. Although the book addresses their struggles with God and with their calling to t… Read More
2020-02-26 11:30
This novel is no Motherless Brooklyn. It’s a lot of froth and not much substance. That said, I still enjoyed it, and the writing is excellent. The main character is L… Read More
2020-02-19 11:30
My brother and I saw the movie THE REIVERS about fifty years ago when we were teenagers. Obviously, I don’t remember it all that well, but I know that we both loved it, and readi… Read More
2020-02-12 11:30
I don’t know exactly how to categorize this book. It’s not a thriller, psychological or otherwise, because all of the mysteries are revealed piecemeal throughout the book… Read More
2020-02-05 11:30
I just wish that every book I read were written half as well as this one. Susan Orlean has educated us here not only about the 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire but about lib… Read More
2020-01-29 12:00
The chapters in this book are basically short stories. One reviewer said that this novel should be read all in one sitting. I agree with that observation, but I did not do that… Read More
2020-01-22 11:00
Since I know virtually nothing about Greek mythology, the events in this story were mostly new to me. In fact, I think not knowing what was going to happen was an advantage. &hell…Read More
2020-01-15 11:30
Although the dialog and language are just as good, I didn’t like this book as much as the first two in the series, Plainsongand Eventide. Neither the characters nor the storyline… Read More
2020-01-08 11:30
Vivian Morris is 89 years old and telling her story to Angela, who has written to Vivian to find out about Vivian’s relationship with Angela’s father. Four hundred or so pa… Read More
2020-01-07 23:18
My chief complaint about this book is that the pace is super pokey. On the plus side, the storyline is good, and the writing is excellent. Best of all, the dialog is snappy, sass… Read More
2020-01-01 11:30
Josephine Bell is a Virginia house slave who is determined to escape. She tried once before, but her very advanced pregnancy forced her to return to her master’s home.  &hell…Read More
2019-12-25 00:50
The third and final section of this book baffled me so much that I had to call into question everything that I had read before that. Suffice it to say that the first section is not wha… Read More
2019-12-18 11:30
A young black man, Jefferson, was with two other young black men when they murdered a white storekeeper. Everyone at the scene except Jefferson died in the ensuing gunfire. He th… Read More
2019-12-11 11:30
Everyone else on the planet seems to love this book, but I feel like I’m being generous to give it 4 stars. I just didn’t think it was special enough to warrant all the pra… Read More
2019-12-04 11:30
I wavered between four and five stars in my opinion of this book. On the one hand, it was overly long, but, on the other hand, I loved the way everything came together in the end. &hell…Read More
2019-11-27 11:30
Janek Mitter wakes up to find his wife Eva dead in the bathtub after a night of serious drinking for the two of them. Janek is certain that he did not kill his wife, but he cannot reme… Read More
2019-11-20 11:30
Thank goodness this book is fiction, because otherwise it would be appalling. The unnamed first-person narrator is a young, beautiful, affluent New Yorker who wants to reboot her life… Read More
2019-11-13 20:55
Slava Gelman’s grandmother has just died. She escaped a Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Belarus, at the age of 15. Now it’s 2006, and she is eligible for restitution from the… Read More
2019-11-06 11:30
Lionel, the narrator of this noir crime novel, has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes him to utter nonsensical words and to touch things he has no business touching. He works for… Read More
2019-10-30 10:30
I was reluctant to read this book, because I had heard so much about it. In some ways, this memoir resembles Angela’s Ashes, All Over But the Shoutin’, The Liars’ Clu… Read More
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