Good bye August and goodbye summer! I complain a fair bit, but here is one thing that I absolutely loved about this summer in Seattle. We only had maybe three days all told when it got above 90°. The majority of the summer was in the mid-70s with dry, sunny days and chilly nights. My kind of weather. I wish I could be as upbeat about my reading, but this year continues to be a ... Read More...
May Reading Recap
To call this month’s reading recap a mashup is an understatement. It could also be the library checkout recap or even the non-fiction recap—which is huge because I’m virtually certain I’ve never read more than one non-fiction book a month, much less four. And on all kinds of subjects! But there you have it. May also turned out to be another monster month for how much I ... Read More...
The Song Rising
Oh, happy day, Paige Mahoney is back in book three of the Bone Season saga! At the end of The Mime Order she had wrested control of the London clairvoyant syndicate from her boss and mentor, Jaxon, and was now the new Underground Queen. Unfortunately, she had not killed Jaxon in the process and when the novel ended she learned that he was working with their greatest ... Read More...
Indelible: A Novel by Adelia Saunders
For as long as Magdalena could remember the words had always been there, although she didn’t used to think of them as words. At first she didn’t think of them as anything, they were just extensions of a person’s skin… What would it be like to know the most important facts of any person’s life just by looking at them? Not because of any psychic ability per se, but ... Read More...
The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma
Often the first person narrative is used by an author to create doubt in the mind of the reader. Ratika Kapur does the opposite in her novel, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, with a narrator who calmly tells the truth about her actions from the novel’s beginning to its end. She is a respectable woman—a wife and mother who works at a doctor’s office in Delhi, India. She ... Read More...
The World Without Us
Tess Müller hasn’t spoken in six months. Her mother, Evangeline, pushes a pram around all the time. Her younger sister draws trees and more trees. In most places they would stand out, but in the Australian town of Bidgalong strange is a relative concept. For decades the hills near the town were home to a cultish commune known as The Hive with its alpha male leader ... Read More...
