The lives of three feisty, snarky women intertwine in popular author Beatrice Williams’ Under the Stars. Containing a more modern setting and more acerbic characters than her usual fare, this women’s fiction novel examines the question of what exactly ties people together – and what pushes them apart. Audrey Fisher is not having a stellar…
Hot Desk is Laura Dickerman’s debut novel. Set in the New York literary world, there are dual timelines with two PoV characters in the present (2022) and a third in the past (1982). The 2022 timeline is a lighthearted rivals-to-lovers slow burn romance as junior editors Ben Heath and Rebecca Blume are forced to share…
Dual timelines are common in historical fiction, and The Flowers Sisters does an excellent job of making five different points of view and two decades fly by like they’re no big deal. The novel loses some points for predictability, but the storytelling and characters make it all worthwhile. It’s 1928 and the titular Flowers sisters…
How to Solve Your Own Murder is a cozy mystery set in a sweet little English village sporting one very peculiar denizen. When seventeen-year-old Frances is told by the fortune teller: Your future contains dry bones. Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird,…
The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a stunning achievement. If that’s not enough to get you to read this (I warn you – tragic, without a single happily ever after involved) romantic epic, then take this into account: it’s almost certainly going to be on my best of year for 2024. In 4 BCE,…
The Uncharted Flight of Olivia West is a lovely, heart-tugging and exciting novel that fictionalizes a real-life air race that was loaded from top to bottom with disasters and drama. We are presented with two timelines. In 1987, sculptress Wren Summers finds herself landing on The Big Island. Her father disappeared years ago, her relationship…
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…
This is a wonderful book. It deftly explores friendship, family, and love. Emily Henry deserves all the love for this heartfelt story–I had an extremely hard time putting it down. Harriet, Sabrina and Cleo have been friends since they were college roommates their freshmen year. They have been coming to Sabrina’s family cottage in Maine…
Suzanne Fortin’s All That We Have Lost is an interesting but flawed story of how a widow, trying to rebuild her life, discovers a secret about a girl who lived during the Nazi occupation of France. I liked the premise a great deal, but have some caveats about the execution. Let’s start with the good….
The Fossil Hunter splits its point of view between two different timelines and characters connected by a fossil. Cooper manages to keep this deft balancing act going, creating three very interesting and worthwhile heroines. Dark and engrossing and with dual timelines that are expertly captured in both time and place, it’s phantasmagorical and beautifully grounded…
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