When Mirabelle Dartigen dies, she leaves her land to her son, and her older daughter gets a very valuable wine collection. Her younger daughter, Framboise, inherits a scrapbook – a stitched-together collection of recipes and scribbled reminiscences. None of the children see anything odd about this. Framboise, they all knew, was the favorite. This is…
The Long Hot Summer is the second novel by Kathleen MacMahon, a television journalist from Ireland. It’s a beautifully written story, which proves to be both a blessing and a curse. Her prose is incredibly lush, and her powers of description are unlike anything I’ve encountered in quite some time. Unfortunately, all this beautiful writing…
Paris is one of my favorite cities to visit, so when I learned that the historical portions of The Confectioner’s Tale are set in Paris in 1910 it seemed a perfect book for me to review. I was intrigued to learn that the “contemporary” portion is set in 1988 – mostly in Cambridge, another favorite…
Jennifer Egan’s a storied writer. She won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2011 for Welcome to the Goon Squad. Her writings appear regularly in the New York Times. I’ve enjoyed all of Ms. Egan’s books but my favorite is her first The Invisible Circus. I recommended it my 18 year old…
A House Without Windows truly embodies the transformative power of reading. The story of modern-day village-life in Afghanistan told though the voices and thoughts of young Afghanis is at once accessible and distancing. So many of the emotions and feelings of daily living are the same, yet the cultural mores are so different from my…
Location, location, location. That’s a popular mantra which discusses what is believed to be the most important selling point of any piece of property. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of it in terms of real estate sales but it‘s certainly an important selling point to me vis-à-vis book buying. That’s because I love armchair…
This début novel features a time-slip plot moving back and forth between events in 1910 and 2010 on a remote island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. The descriptions of the setting are vivid and evoke an almost gothic feel. While much of the language is beautiful, the descriptive passages overwhelm the characters and plot, and left…
Daughters of the Bride is a delightful book that contains four separate, yet interconnected love stories, all of which have a satisfying happy ending. Courtney, Sienna, and Rachel are three sisters with complex relationships who have been tasked with planning their mother’s second wedding. While most people may assume it’s the stepfather who causes the…
Novels featuring feuding sisters are a dime a dozen these days. Sure, I have enjoyed many of them, but I can’t keep myself from longing for an author who can bring something unique to this well-used trope. With First Comes Love, author Emily Giffin manages to deliver something which is, if not entirely unique, still…
When We Were Sisters is the latest standalone offering from author Emilie Richards. It’s an intense look at America’s foster system, as well as a touching portrayal of sisterhood. Robin and Cecilia aren’t related by blood, but they consider themselves sisters just the same. Raised together in a series of good and not-so-good foster homes,…
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