The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers suffers by comparison with the flood of other rock and roll novels clogging the market. While it gets points for making its characters flawed and realistic – and keeps things engaging – it doesn’t stand apart enough in a field clogged with these sorts of stories in a…
A rough start makes All My Secrets a difficult book to begin with, but a charming second half is the reward for those who can make it through that rough patch. New York, 1898. When the wealthy Arthur Stanhope III dies at the age of forty-seven, it causes no end of turmoil for his family….
The Foxhole Victory Tour takes us on a journey through the non-celebrity entertainment offered for the enlisted troops during WWII and provides two fascinating heroines as a focal point for that trip. Trumpet player Maggie McCleod has never met a rule she didn’t want to break. Her latest bit of bother has found her unemployed…
The London Bookshop Affair is a dual-timeline tale of love, war, and family set amidst the dark days of WWII and the glamour of London in the 1960s. It’s 1942 when we meet Jeannie Duchesne, nineteen years old and newly in love with an American Airman. He goes off to battle while she works quietly…
‘One of these things is not like the others’ is the refrain that was going through my head for most of Ann Aguirre’s The Only Purple House in Town, which, on Goodreads, was listed as the fourth book in her Fix-It Witches series but which Amazon lists as a standalone. Amazon has it right. Going…
Amanda Prowse’s My Husband’s Wife begins with Rosie Tipcott happy with her life in the town of Woolacombe. She and her husband Phil have two lively young daughters, her in-laws love her, and she has a best friend to confide in. Sure, there are things she’d change if she could. Her mother walked out when…
Pride and Prejudice meets the Kardashian siblings in Katie Cotugno’s latest novel, Meet the Benedettos, and the end result is fun, fast-paced and snappy. Her humanistic, big-hearted portraits of sibling love compelled me to keep reading until I’d gobbled up the whole novel in one sitting. The five Benedetto sisters – wannabe novelist Lilly, the…
The Wings of Poppy Pendleton is an engrossing dual-timeline story featuring three women whose lives intersect over the course of several decades. It is 1907, and the world is in the grip of the opulence and glamour of the Gilded Age. At least as far as the Pendleton family is concerned. The patriarch, Leslie, has…
Virginia Kantra resculpts The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a non-magical but still fun to read story about one woman’s coming of age. This Dorothy’s story is a trip over the rainbow that takes the reader to unexpected places. Dorothy – Dee – Gale and her younger sister, Toni, were raised mainly by a string…
I found The Leftover Woman hard to grade. It kept me reading, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. If you are looking for an exploration of what it might be like to be a mother affected by China’s One Child policy, this could be the story for you. Maybe. Jasmine was never wanted. In…
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