“There are words that I am looking for and when I find those words I will know that they were the words I was looking for, to tell people about the shapes of things inside me.” As Dear Lucy begins there is a sense that the narrator, Lucy, is a bit off. Her determination to be acknowledged as good and useful is extreme and the lengths to which she goes to be heard become ... Read More...
Swimming at Night
By page three of Swimming at Night we have already learned of the death of Katie Greene’s sister, Mia. From that point onward, there is little opportunity to stop and catch your breath, as author Lucy Clarke neatly propels the action forward in this, her debut novel, where the mysteries pile up almost immediately. Mia was in Bali, not a country she was supposed to be in, and ... Read More...
Equal of the Sun
There is not much historical fiction out there about sixteenth-century Iran (Persia at the time) and what there is, is about the shahs of the day. The world of women and the harem is generally written about from the stereotypical perspective of one man and hundreds of lovelies who live only to serve him. A heroine might appear but even then she is most often saved by a prince. ... Read More...
Ashenden: A Novel
Ashenden is the story of a home in England. Actually, it is an estate as it encompasses thousands of acres. It is inherited in 2010 by Charlie and Ros Minton from their aunt. What follows is a story that, as it covers over 200 years, unfolds with the same stately grace as the house itself, for the house is as imbued with meaning and life as the people who lived in it. After ... Read More...
Lessons from Madame Chic
Lessons from Madame Chic: 20 Stylish Secrets I Learned while Living in Paris is the offspring of author Jennifer Scott’s successful blog The Daily Connoisseur which is the result of a semester spent in France living with a French family while in college. Scott took her time to heart and shares with readers the French way of life and why it might be worth trying in ... Read More...
The Bathing Women
In a family with dignity, there was no room for “other things”, no matter how profoundly someone in this family was shamed, or how deeply the person suffered. The Bathing Women takes place from the mid-1960s to present day in the city of Fuan, China. It begins with the sisters, Tiao and Fan, being left in a small apartment by their parents, Wu and Yixun, who have been ... Read More...
