The Gilmore Guide to Books

Connecting Books and Readers One Review at a Time

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Reviews
    • Reviews by Author
    • Reviews by Title
    • Reviews by Genre
  • Podcast
  • Policies
    • Review Policy
    • Cookie Policy
    • Privacy Policy

Vintage: A Novel

August 15, 2014

vintage

Hourglass Vintage is a charming used clothing shop in Madison, Wisconsin. It is also where three women at very different stages of life meet in Vintage, the debut novel from author Susan Gloss. Violet is the owner,  Amithi is a middle-aged Indian woman, who brings in much of her jewelry and clothes to sell, and April is a pregnant eighteen-year-old who thought she would be ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: chick lit, debut, fashion, William Morrow

Friendswood: A Novel

August 13, 2014

friendswood

Friendswood, Texas is a good, old oil-based community. Rosemont is a small suburb built near a refinery and life is good there, until funny greasy black coils of goo start appearing in people’s yards like fat worms after a rain. Friendswood by René Steinke begins years after the fallout from the leakage of deadly chemicals in the field around which the houses of Rosemont were ... Read More...

7 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, Riverhead Books

California: A Novel

August 11, 2014

california

There is no prelude in Edan Lepucki’s debut novel, California, no introduction to life in a time of normalcy. Instead, the novel begins with Cal and Frida living in a small house in a forest somewhere in the U.S. but we don’t know where because state names are no longer used. The dystopia is in full swing as America has finally collapsed due to climate change, the oil crisis, ... Read More...

14 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, debut, dystopia, Little Brown and Company, science fiction

The Troop: A Novel

August 8, 2014

troop

Gross, gooey, and well…yucky, and those are the positive adjectives if you’re a horror fan. Nick Cutter’s The Troop goes exactly where squeamish people don’t want to go and does so in a way that if you’ve started the novel makes you unlikely to stop. When the nastiness appeared after less than thirty pages I wondered how Cutter would be able to sustain the narrative but no ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Gallery, horror

The Girls of Atomic City

August 7, 2014

girls of atomic city

Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan by the United States. Now threats of atomic war loom and fade whenever one country gets mad at another. I wondered about the path we took to making the bomb and this led me to Denise Kiernan’s book The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II, a highly ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Non-fiction Tagged: book clubs, history, Touchstone, women, WWII

The Home Place

August 6, 2014

home place

  Alma Terrebonne is doing well as a corporate lawyer in Seattle until she gets the call that her younger sister Vicky is dead. Suddenly, she has to walk away from one of the biggest deals of her career and head back to Montana, the place where her family has lived for generations. The Home Place is both the title of Carrie La Seur’s debut novel and what the Terrebonne family ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: debut, family, the West, William Morrow

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 223
  • 224
  • 225
  • 226
  • 227
  • …
  • 288
  • Next Page »
  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • Goodreads
  • Instagram
  • Substack

Save time and subscribe via email

No time to keep checking for new reviews? Enter your email address to subscribe and receive notifications of new posts by email. No spam!

Bookshop

Currently Reading

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
by Emily Nagoski
The Dutch House
The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
by Adrienne Brodeur

goodreads.com

Affiliate Disclosure

I’m an affiliate for Bookshop. If you click on a link that takes you to their site and make a purchase I’ll earn a small fee, which goes towards the costs of maintaining this site. Your support is appreciated. Thank you!

Archives

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Theme Design By Studio Mommy · Copyright © 2025

Copyright © 2025 · Beyond Madison Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in