The week Saoirse Aylward is born her father is killed in an accident, leaving her mother, Eileen alone to raise her. Their lives in a small village in western Ireland are at the heart of Donal Ryan’s boisterous, tender novel The Queen of Dirt Island. Although the novel stays within the village’s borders it’s an expansive story encompassing four generations of Irish women with ... Read More...
This Other Eden
In 1911 there was a small island off the coast of Maine comprised of a group of families who were the descendants of the island’s original 1792 settlers—an escaped slave, his Irish wife, and later, other refugees from society. The island is still there, but its inhabitants are long gone. Paul Harding’s novel, This Other Eden, is the elegiac recounting of their history, lives, ... Read More...
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
How wonderful to start the week with a book I loved so much I’m ready to read it again. Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes is her latest foray into the retelling of famous Greek myths from a female perspective. In this case it is the fearsome Medusa, known as one of the most terrifying monsters in the ancient Greek world. One look from her turned any living object into stone. In the ... Read More...
January Reading Wrap-Up
What a month! By and large January had mostly great reading, but there were some real misses. I reviewed the books I enjoyed so this recap is going to be a bit less upbeat with the books I didn’t love. One in particular is a heartbreaker. Either I read far too much or Reef Road was not the thriller for me because I can’t remember much about it at all. Set in Palm ... Read More...
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas opens with a charred corpse being found near a humanitarian aid compound that sits in a remote village on the border between north and South Sudan. The body’s discovery is the grim reminder that violent clashes between the government and rebels are increasing. This is the first in a series of events that upsets the fragile balance between the ... Read More...
2022 Wrap-Up
I started 2023 strong with The Light Pirate, a book I found riveting, but before I go full bore into the year, I need to wrap up 2022 as I read a lot more books (180 to be exact) and never reviewed some of them. I’m also going to do something I’ve never done before: recommend a book without a real review, just a sentence or two. Basically, you take my word for it that this is a ... Read More...
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