When three members of my family rave about a novel, I really don’t have much choice but to read it, which is how I found myself immersed in the early days of WWII with a young Ukrainian sniper. A female sniper fighting on the front lines in Kate Quinn’s propulsive The Diamond Eye. Lyudmila Pavlichenko is still a teen and a single mother when Hitler invades Russian ... Read More...
Winterland: A Novel
Does anyone else remember the USSR dominance in women’s gymnastics in the 1970s? When a name like Ludmilla Tourischeva might be the only Russian an American knew? A new novel, Winterland, takes place in the years when the balletic old guard of gymnasts like Tourischeva is giving way to fearless sprites like Olga Korbut. It’s the story of Anya, a young girl whose whole life is ... Read More...
Stalled: Mini-Reviews
In the past I’ve done a feature called It’s Not You It’s Me to indicate books I didn’t enjoy but that I believe other readers might like. Today is a bit different because in those cases I finished the books. With these three books I stalled out, set the book down and never came back to it. This is likely due to my personal circumstances—namely moving across country with a lot ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: Mother Country
Nadia’s life is not an easy one. She works not one, but two jobs—as a home attendant for an elderly man and as a nanny for a little girl. It’s necessary because she lives in Brooklyn while her daughter Larissa is still back in Ukraine. They’ve been separated for six years. Lonely years for Nadia as a non-English speaker, looked upon with distrust by the other Ukrainians she ... Read More...
I Was Anastasia: A Novel
I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon achieves quite a feat—taking a subject about which there is no longer any mystery and making it mysterious. Thanks to DNA testing, it is now known that Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia died with the rest of her family in the summer of 1918, slaughtered by the Communists in the basement of a house in the town of Ekaterinburg. But, for ... Read More...
Eight Books I Can’t Wait to Read This Fall
Wow. Apparently, this summer is over. September and back-to-school and all those markers heralding fall arrive next week. I wish I had a great book to wrap up my summer Monday reviews, but the high expectations I had for The Resurrection of Joan Ashby crashed and burned so I was left with nothing to review for today. In lieu of my opinion (which can get exhausting, I know), I ... Read More...
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