Historical fiction
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Stella Riley’s work, so anyone reading this review could be forgiven for thinking that the DIK rating was a foregone conclusion. And perhaps it was – I’ve always found her writing, characterisation and storytelling to be of consistently high quality, ...
Crown of Stars is the second installment in Sophie Jaff's Nightsong trilogy. I started reading it without prior knowledge of the series – and discovered that was a very bad idea because I didn't understand the story at all. So I picked up the previous book, Love Is Red, read it, and then returned ...
Ruby Sutton thought the call into her editor’s office would result in the termination of her employment; instead, she is offered the opportunity of a lifetime. She is to go to London and report from there on the European war. In the summer of 1940 there could be no sweeter assignment for an ambiti ...
Confession time. When I picked up The Jane Austen Project for review, I really didn’t expect it to be a book I couldn’t put down. I thought the premise - two time travellers go back to 1815 to meet Jane Austen and secure a previously unpublished manuscript - was interesting (which was why I ...
C+
While researching her mother’s life story, the youngest of Rida‘s four daughters slowly comes to learn more about her spirited, non-traditional, sassy, self-confident parent in well-known YA author Cynthia Voigt’s first novel for adults in many years. But as brassy originality clashes with u ...
The combination of cheap and "sounds intriguing" has lured me into buying many a book. And since I'm fairly dangerous in used bookstores, I have a massive TBR pile. So, when prompted to pick out a book by a new-to-me author, my dilemma was something along the lines of which new-to-me author to liber ...
We mere mortals have always been obsessed with the idea of immortality. With The Apothecary's Curse, author Barbara Barnett taps into that fascination by bringing us the story of two men bound together by their inability to age. The tale revolves around the ideas of what it means to be alive and h ...
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 fa ...
A Woman’s Place was the first book by Lynn Austin I ever read and I was thoroughly impressed. Set during WWII and dealing with the whole idea of a woman’s proper place in the world, the book becameto me the essence of what a great Inspirational novel should be. In fact, I loved it so much it mad ...
For the longest time, Susanna Kearsley, Lauren Willig and Susan Meissner were the only authors I regularly encountered who wrote dual timeline novels. However, they seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. I love this device, so I'm certainly not complaining. In fact, I was quite eager to read Secre ...