I am so upset about this stupid book. The first in Hannah Kaner’s Fallen Gods series, Godkiller is maddening to read. I was reading it for a book club (and none of us are surprised), so when I struggled from the near-beginning with the writing, I kept going to see if I really had to…
Worth Fighting For by Jesse Q. Sutanto comes to a bookshop near you in a couple, short days. I got an ARC as a bookseller and was curious to read Sutanto for the first time. I am also actively looking for romance authors who I can stand behind. I did not realize exactly what this…
I haven’t been able to find a lot of recommendations for Mother’s Day reads. This year I had Mother-Daughter Murder Night and The School for Good Mothers lined up and only got to one. That leaves one for next year, though, already sitting on my shelf. As for Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon, well,…
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch will be published in June in both England and America. (There is a giveaway on GoodReads, if you want to enter.) I expect it to be well-received. It is a beautiful, poignant, and pacific book with strong currents of pain, injustice, and joy beneath that carefully considered surface of…
And no, we are not referring to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, although, actually, I love those giant anthologies that Norton has made for decades. And Diane Seuss references the Anthology in her latest book of collected poems, Modern Poetry. This is a collection that ruminates on modern poetry as one of its main…
I have not had this much fun reading a book(s) in a long time. And it’s not like I haven’t had some fun reading some books lately, it’s just that the Love’s Academic series by India Holton is the most fun. Victorian England, fantasy, science, romance, and Indiana Jones, but over-the-top on all counts. I…
Now that all ya’ll are recovering from your midnight Emily Henry parties, I have a review for you. Just kidding. If you were at a midnight release party, you own the book and probably don’t want my two cents. Go read the book and enjoy. As for those of you who don’t know what I…
I was looking at the line of April TBR book spines on my shelf last night, thinking about how good they all looked and wondering how many of them will disappoint me. I’ll say it yet again: I wanted to like Beasts of Prey (Beasts of Prey #1) by Ayana Gray. For a little while…
I have been reading at least one picture book per month, this year. I love picture books. I sometimes feel like that’s cheating, to read a children’s book, but there is no cheating. I am making this up. I read Doug Salati’s Hot Dog because it won the Caldecott and Ezra Jack Keats awards a…
There is a new version of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It has an additional 200 recipes and was published in 2014. However, I got my very beat-up copy in 2001 (when it was shiny and new), so this is a review using the old version, but…
I have been recommending The Vegetarian by Han Kang at the bookshop. The thing is, I recommend books sometimes that I didn’t really enjoy reading, because I understand that not every reader is me. If there is a connection there… I will recommend it. But the truth is that I have mixed feelings about The…
Is there a hotter book than James by Percival Everett? Sure, the popularity is waning by now, but there’s still no paperback, and we still keep it on the front table in a tall stack at the bookshop because even a year later, James is selling. It’s being read. People are loving it. And the…
Do I need to give a synopsis for And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie? It’s a classic. Well, I will anyhow. Ten people across England get an alluring message from a Mr. and Mrs. Owen asking them to come to an isolated island off the coast of Devon. After they arrive, a disembodied…
Comedy is really social, maybe even socio-political. Which is why a book like Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis hasn’t aged well. It’s funny (I can see that, or at least some of that), but the British academic satire from the 50s was mostly beyond me, at least emotionally. There were a few scenes that I…
I think Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang—a debut author—has potential to be a hit this summer. (It is due for publication at the end of April). It is an easy read that goes down smooth while also being a roller coaster of an experience. Don’t come here for literary acrobatics, but for social…
My main take-away after reading the enormous (600-page) sci-fi Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky: this is a tale of two styles. The story jumps back and forth between a group of humans on one of the last spaceships in the universe (concentrating on one character, Holsten), and the intellectual and social development of newly…
February is short and it has Valentines Day. I like to pull out a new romance to read in February. It can be contemporary, it can be a classic, it can be cross-genre. Here are some books I have read in previous years that I would recommend: I noticed that I have read a lot…
The cover. That’s what a lot of reviews mention because, well, most people expected to read one kind of thing based on the cover and then got something else. Myself, I read Miss Iceland by Audur Ava Olafsdottir (ohd-thur ah-vah oh-lahfs-dah-tur—ish) because it was a book club read for one of the clubs I am…
Scythe by Neal Shusterman is book one of the Arc of a Scythe trilogy, one of four (almost five) books in the Scythedom, but because I won’t be reading the second or third for some time, I am going to review this one now. You can’t have missed seeing this book around, especially if you…
Warning: unpopular literary opinion. This book was everywhere last year (meaning 2023). The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by respected, successful author James McBride was called a top novel of the year, including at Goodreads. But how a third of Goodreads readers rate this five stars, I have no earthly (haha) idea. Sure, as one…
the starving artist 