

Review of Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan
Ryan builds a vivid small-town Irish setting with its gloomy, then alarming, descent into corruption. The twenty-one points of view were...
Oct 2


Review of The Summer War by Naomi Novik
Novik's novella The Summer War reads like a fable, with unexpected twists and turns; duty, clever evasion, and curses; a strange world...
Oct 1


Review of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan's new literary fiction looks back upon our present with a cutting 2119 eye. An enthused future academic and a contemporary...
Sep 30


Review of The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club #1) by Richard Osman
I was delighted by the poignancy, humor, and layers in the first installment of this series of stories about sharp, disparate...
Sep 25


Review of The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Smith was inspired by the real-life Victorian England case of a cockney impostor attempting to wrest an inheritance from the nobility,...
Sep 24


Review of The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
The Briar Club employs nine points of view to tell the story of life in a female-only boarding house in 1950s, McCarthy-era Washington,...
Sep 23


Review of Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan's literary fiction traces decades of the messy, poignant lives of two families shaped by uncompromising societal...
Sep 18


Review of A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
I loved my first T. Kingfisher read. This was dark, sometimes wryly funny, haunting, and intriguing, and the resolutions to the...
Sep 17


Review of Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein
Allision Epstein shapes Charles Dickens's greedy criminal mastermind Jacob Fagin into a character with a rich backstory, showing him to...
Sep 16


Review of Shield of Sparrows (Shield of Sparrows #1) by Devney Perry
This first installment in the series sets up an overlooked princess who becomes a heroine; deadly monsters who may be being treated...
Sep 11


Review of Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
I shuddered as I read (during daylight hours only) Caroline Fraser's painstaking accounts of the shockingly numerous serial killers who...
Sep 10


Review of The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path #1) by Antonia Hodgson
The first book in Hodgson's trilogy is smart, mysterious, charming, and layered. I loved the dark academia setting; the brilliant,...
Sep 9


Review of Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh
I loved the twist, double-twist of my first Cavanagh mystery, and the story's revenge and renegade justice are layered with unexpected...
Sep 4


Review of My Friends by Fredrik Backman
I liked the unlikely modern-day friendship and depth of connection, and I love a best-friend story, but the past timeline and immense,...
Sep 3


Review of This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune
I love the way Fortune builds a summer tableau, but the reasoning for this forbidden love didn't hold up for me, and I was frustrated by...
Sep 2


Review of A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
Mandanna's is a fun magical story featuring an oddball cast of characters, satisfying justice, love, chosen family, funny dialogue, and...
Aug 28


Review of Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart's story of an uncommonly intelligent fifth-grader, Vera, allows for a precocious child's point of view and observations...
Aug 27


Review of Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford
Comedian Maria Bamford's memoir is unflinching in examining her own base impulses and personal challenges such as mental illness and...
Aug 26


Review of Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
This short novel explores an alternate-history, near-future, post-war San Francisco in which robots come online and create a noodle shop...
Aug 19


Review of The Knight and the Moth (Stonewater Kingdom #1) by Rachel Gillig
The shadowy, eerie tone of the first title in Gillig's Stonewater Kingdom series gives way to heartwarming, sometimes funny moments as an...
Aug 14
