Happy Monday and welcome to my first yearend best-of lists. Today is a favorite category: best debuts. Finding new authors is one of my greatest reading pleasures and 2021 proved to be a very good year. Of all my reading, 38% was debut authors and of those debuts I rated 36% 3.5 stars or higher, with 3.5 being my baseline for a book I’d recommend to others. Finally, of ... Read More...
2021 Underrated Gems
Every year I read books I loved, but that seemed to go under-the-radar for most people. Yes, reading is a very personal endeavor and what is 5 stars for me may not be 5 stars for you, but I’ve got 7 underrated gems I read this year that I’m almost evangelical about—I loved them that much. So, I’m spreading that love in the hopes that you might discover your next great read ... Read More...
Shiner: A Novel by Amy Jo Burns
Stories of contemporary Southern mountain men abound (Bull Mountain, The Line That Held Us), but examples of women are a bit harder to come by. The fact Amy Jo Burns brings three such women to life in her novel, Shiner, is just one outstanding element of many in this lush debut. Raised in isolation in the West Virginia mountains, Wren doesn’t know much of the outside world. ... Read More...
The Island of Missing Trees
Cyprus is a country literally divided, right down to its capital. In 1960 when the British finally left they repeated their practice of leaving a political vacuum by not resolving issues between existing groups to ensure a peaceful transition. As a result, the island’s population, mixed between a Greek majority and a Turkish minority, lived with simmering resentments until the ... Read More...
The People We Keep: A Novel
At 16 April Sawicki’s life looks pretty well-mapped out, if there were such a thing as maps going nowhere. She lives in a broken motorhome, alone because her father has a new girlfriend and doesn’t come home anymore, and her mother is long gone. She’s flunking out of high school, but her boyfriend is the handsomest guy there and wants to marry her. Why not? He’ll get a decent ... Read More...
State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Clinton
We’ve all heard of crossover artists. Singers who become actors. Actors who become writers. But politicians? Not so much. Politicking is a skill that doesn’t often translate to other arenas. I tried reading fiction by a politician that I admire tremendously and I quit at 10%. So, it was with great trepidation that I decided to read Hillary Clinton’s fictional debut, State of ... Read More...
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