Happily Lost in Words

Sometimes in life you stumble across things you didn’t even know you needed, and then you realize your life is better for having discovered this particular treasure. I didn’t know I needed to read a romance novel told from the perspective of a dog named Harold who is trying desperately to fulfill his favorite human’s dying wish that he help the man she loved find the strength to love again. And…

Historical fiction novels succeed when they do more than entertain. They succeed when you can learn history from them, when they can be fact-checked and proven true to history, and when the creations of the author are woven seamlessly into the fabric of history. Michelle Collins Anderson succeeds on all three counts with The Moonshine Women. The novels spans a couple decades, following the…

The Best Little Motel in Texas is such a fun ride! Quirky, straight-laced librarian inherits a motel in rural Texas from a great-aunt she’s never met. Meaning to sell it immediately and return to her favored life of anonymity in Dallas, she discovers that it’s not nearly as simple as that. In a perfect world, she’d be able to take care of things as quickly and easily as she can but she knows…

Last November & December I binge-watched Black Sails and got awfully swept in the story of Anne Bonny. I happily fell down many a rabbit hole of research, trying to learn the little bit that is known about one of the few, and the most well-known, women to openly sail on a pirate ship during the Golden Age of Piracy. Anne, to me, was easily one of the most interesting characters on the show and…

Of course I seek out books I know I’ll like – from authors I know are going to bring it, from genres that are almost always wins for me, from sales because sometimes just getting a new book is enough. But the more I pay attention to what I’m reading, the more I’m realizing something. It’s really easy to end up in what I’m calling an Era, and to do it accidentally. To be clear, when I say…

To write a thriller from four different perspectives, each in first person, and have them all be unique and clear – and lend them all an air of mystery that holds steady through the entire story, is no easy feat. But Darby Kane has done it in Such a Clever Girl. I don’t know if it’s meant to be a little ironic, that title choice, but it seems like it is since Stella, Marni, Hanna, and Aubrey all…

Confession #1: I’ve always been kind of a snob about retellings, mildly refusing to read them because… I don’t know, if the original is good enough to be retold just read the original? Confession #2: I’ve never read Moby Dick. Given these two confessions, you might wonder why in the world I wanted to read Xiaolu Guo’s retelling of Herman Melville’s story. Honestly, I wonder that too. As best I…

Thanks to the author, Celadon Books, and NetGalley for the chance to read an early copy of this book in exchange for an original review. As someone who has always been fascinated by history and driven by a desire to know more about my family history, I understood Christine Kuehn’s descriptions of her frustration that her father never talked in detail about his childhood and about his parents. I…

 I know now that there has been a novel written about Mary Ann Patten and that what she accomplished in the short time she lived in the 1850s translated into the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy still today teaching about what she did and naming their health clinic after her. I had never heard of her before I requested the chance to read THE SEA CAPTAIN’S WIFE based solely on a newly found interest…

I held my breath listening to this book. I gasped. I felt my heart beat faster. I guessed, or tried to, just what was going on. Meagan Church’s novel tackles an age-old problem – that women are expected to be something very particular, without faltering and without complaint. And that no one is more particular and more demanding of women than other women, or each woman herself. If we can only…

I finished Kristi DeMeester’s DARK SISTERS a few days ago & I haven’t been sure what to rate it or how to review it. You know how when something is… complex and you need to sit with it awhile, see if it’s still affecting you before you’re sure how you feel? It’s like that. DARK SISTERS was always going to be at least a three-star book for me. Other than the occasional Stephen King and Chuck…

It’s really hard for me to review Justine Champine’s NEEDLE LAKE. I see so much of myself in one of the main characters that, in a sense, giving a critique and a rating to this novel is almost like giving a critique and a rating to myself. And that’s just uncomfortable for everyone, as I’m sure most of you know from personal experience. I was, however, lucky enough to receive an advance copy of…

The surprise twist at the end of this book saved it. I don’t think it was meant to be such a surprise twist, but it was. The story focuses on Fern, a librarian with deep sensory issues who is making her way rather successfully through a confusing world of what seem like far better adapted people. Her twin sister Rose’s journal is a periodic, sporadic interlude throughout the story. And having…

In a (horrible) time when random TikToks and Reddit threads can convince people that Helen Keller and Harriet Tubman weren’t real (they were, just stop with the insanity), it isn’t surprising that a sixty-five year old mystery in which nine people died in a remote part of Siberia with no clear cut cause or culprit has spawned even more conspiracy theories than it had in decades past. Everybody…

“War wins. And it keeps on winning, over and over again.” Captain Edward Montfort tells his sister Evelyn that when she begs him to tell her why he pretended not to remember Private Rowan Hind, who asked her to help find him. It is the answer he gives to her questions about why he followed orders, ordering men to shoot their comrades-in-arms. It is the thing he says when he tells her he’s going…

 A downside to having historical fiction as a comfort genre when it comes to novels is that now and then you come across a book that shatters your soul for reasons far beyond the angst, heartbreak, and tragedy that tend to populate books about inspired by the true events of human history. Sometimes the books tell a story that happened decades, centuries ago and it’s horrific how people treated…

Absolutely ticking the boxes that make it a contemporary, queer novel about the push and pull of life in the microcosm of small-town America, Brian Schaefer’s Town & Country is the story of a town in the midst of change. It is the story of how lifelong residents with long-held beliefs about faith, family, and foundation are challenged when their old farmhouses and well-preserved main street…