A Prayer For Travelers by Ruchika Tomar. This author is a Wallace Stegner Fellow (which means she participated in a two year crazy wonderful program at Stanford!) This novel was well written and showed her talent as a writer but it is NOT an easy read…what reviewers call “the complexity of a shifting timeline” means […]

Justice Denied by J.A. Jance. Yep, it was time for a genre detective story. Not sure, but I really need one once in a while (okay, often, I love them!) We’re back in Washington and I did enjoy the fact that detectives J.P. Beaumont and Mel Soames live in an area where a friend of […]

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. This is marked as a NYTimes “Notable Book,” which I find is the perfect description. Not an easy or ordinary read, but a very unusual tale of Chin, a Chinese railway worker, BJ, an escaped mental hospital patient, Adelaide Dixon, a doctor and suffragist, and Sarah Canary, a mysterious […]

Almost Missed You by Jessica Strawser. I met this author at a writers conference in New Mexico. I was interested in her book because of the genre it was classified….”domestic fiction” and I was curious about what this really meant. I guess it means fiction about relationships between husband and wife? Not sure. Anyway, this […]

Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just having a reaction to the whole “genre” discussion that has become way too much a part of my life. As I read this book I knew what was going to happen. I knew who would betray who, who would rescue who else. […]

I am way behind on blogs so you get another book review this month. I am not way behind on reading because it is the thing I can do when on a road trip AND read is what I do, with my headlamp and candles, when the power is out…and it has been out. (For […]

Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land. So…..one of my beta readers/critique partners suggested my current work in progress might be a psycho thriller. While I considered this suggestion, I decided to read a couple, with the idea it might help me make my decision on the matter. This book started off in a pretty […]

The Children Act by Ian McEwan.  I know he is a prolific and well loved author, but I almost didn’t keep reading after the first chapter. His use of language was overwhelming, everything so heavy and going on and on. I got that this was going to be the story of a British Judge and […]

Resistance by Anita Shreve.  Recently on some of my FB writers groups the talk has been of fear of showing a work in progress to others because they might “steal” the idea of the story. As I read this novel I knew that either 1 – I had read it before or 2 – I […]

The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld. I really liked this book, but I’m having trouble putting why into words. There isn’t one particular thing I can say kept me engaged…I think it was a combination of the novel plot idea and the consistency of the writing. There weren’t a whole lot of surprises, some twists […]