When I was around 9, my family's summer road trip (always ten days, meticulously planned by my father) took us to Roanoke Island and we saw the play about the lost colony. 1587! I didn't understand in 1963 or so how old that was. At that age, the U.S. Colonial times melted together with Columbus … Continue reading The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare -Kimberly Brock
Category: Book Reviews
Yellow Wife -Sadeqa Johnson (Audio)
Yellow Wife tells a tale of Pheby Delores Brown, an enslaved woman whose life we follow from a fairly privileged position on a plantation to serving as the concubine of a cruel man who runs a jail/breaking house/auction service for enslaved people in Richmond, Virginia. The novel has been around for awhile now and the … Continue reading Yellow Wife -Sadeqa Johnson (Audio)
Greetings From Asbury Park – Daniel H. Turtel
Casey Larken's father is dead and his half brother Davey inherited dad Joseph's multimillion dollar fortune. Davey was the only "legitimate" child. Joseph was a pretty awful guy, as we learn when the book opens with his sparsely attended funeral. Casey- well, he got a house and $50,000 and the house turns out to be … Continue reading Greetings From Asbury Park – Daniel H. Turtel
The Candy House – Jennifer Egan
In the near future, we can all externalize our unconsciousness and store it in a cube, retrieving all our memories/life experiences from our brain only to watch them again. Naturally, people decide to turn this into a collective consciousness, allowing anyone to watch, say, hundreds of individual experiences of a concert from 1965. And woven … Continue reading The Candy House – Jennifer Egan
Shadows of Berlin – David R. Gilliam
Rachel Perlman is married to Aaron, a "Flatbush Jew." It is the early/mid- 1950s. She is a displaced person from Berlin, Germany, a Jew who survived the Holocaust and is left with the knowledge her mother perished in a gas chamber. Rachel has suffered deep trauma over part of what she did to survive. Rachel's … Continue reading Shadows of Berlin – David R. Gilliam
148 Charles Street – Tracy Daugherty
148 Charles Street is a truly interesting piece of historical fiction that covers periods in the lives of Willa Cather and Elizabeth "Elsie" Sergeant. It is less a day to day description of their long friendship and more a study of how they influenced one another, despite their significantly different world views and life choices. … Continue reading 148 Charles Street – Tracy Daugherty
Bloomsbury Girls – Natalie Jenner (audio)
NOTE: I listened to the very well produced and read audio version of this, so do not have the written word to remind me of names or spellings. Did my best. Enjoy this book with many a smile and some moments of reflection! This is a lovely story capturing post-war London in 1950 and a … Continue reading Bloomsbury Girls – Natalie Jenner (audio)
Pathological – Sarah Fay
Pathological is a memoir in part, a lesson in punctuation that is historical and metaphorical, and a book that asks us to seriously question the credibility and authority of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), presently in its fifth edition. I'm not sure who the audience with be for this, but I … Continue reading Pathological – Sarah Fay
What Happened to the Bennetts – Lisa Scottoline
What Happened to the Bennetts is a very original story of a family who ends up in the FBI Witness Protection Program after an attempted carjacking goes very wrong. When a popular soccer mom and dad, son and daughter, living as --part of a neighborhood with an active social media presence and tons of friends-- … Continue reading What Happened to the Bennetts – Lisa Scottoline
French Braid – Anne Tyler
I'm turning this book over and over in my mind. I will for awhile because it's such an insightful study of a family's humanity. It's no surprise that French Braid is beautifully written. It's by Anne Tyler, who I really should have returned to sooner. Years ago, I read The Accidental Tourist and I never … Continue reading French Braid – Anne Tyler
They Called me Bookworm 