My disillusionment with thrillers continues… ☹️ I haven’t read a thriller in a while, so when I picked Magpie, based on its synopsis, I was hoping the plot would be something in between Ashley Audrain’s The Push and Sandie Jones’s The Other Woman. Magpie is about motherhood alright, but its story was just underwhelming! Magpie […]
I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was. With those opening lines, Lee Cole had me hooked on one of the best (delayed) coming-of-age stories I’ve read in a while! Groundskeeping, set in rural Kentucky […]
I’ve been feeling down lately because of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Sri Lankan economic crisis. I’ve been glued to the news and haven’t read a book for over a month now (!!!), and I couldn’t think of a better way to get myself out of this funk than curling up with a […]
I’ve called Michigan home for the last six years and fallen in love with this place so much that every time I read a novel set in Michigan, it tingles my heart! Tin Camp Road, set in the Michigan upper peninsula, is no different. Ellen Airgood is a Michigander, so this novel is partly a […]
Woman on Fire, which combines a bit of WWII history and Nazi-looted art, is one of the best thrillers I have read in a while. The novel begins when Margaux de Laurent, the heiress to a million-dollar art gallery business, kills the son of (fictional) Helmuth Geisler in cold blood. Helmuth had led the group […]
I’m glad I didn’t read Station Eleven before the Covid situation (somewhat) settled down. In this eerie novel, set in a post-apocalyptic world, over 99% of the world’s population have died from a super flu variant that quickly swept through the continents, and the last remaining survivors in North America have spread across the continent, […]
I picked up this slender novel because of its title – we’ll be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary this month, so I hoped this would be a joyous novel to fit the occasion. However, sadly, this wedding story is rather glum! The entirety of the novel, written in 1932 while the author’s marriage was falling […]
Jumping Jenny was my first time reading a crime classic by Anthony Berkeley, and I was in for a real treat with it! According to Martin Edwards, Berkeley, one of the founding members of the Detection Club formed in 1930, is known for the unconventional novels he wrote featuring Roger Sheringham, a private detective, and […]
Unpopular opinion time! I really wanted to love Shit Cassandra Saw. Stories in Kirby’s debut anthology explore many facets of womanhood and gender disparity – themes that normally tickle my fancy. However, most stories in this collection fell flat for me. 😦 After reading Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at That […]
After reading The Christie Affair, I was in the mood to read a crime classic by Dame Agatha, and this time around, I decided to go with a Miss Marple mystery. I don’t think I have ever read a Miss Marple before, and The Body in The Library, the second book in the Miss Marple […]
The Christie Affair is a fictionalized account of Agatha Christie‘s disappearance back in 1926 for ten days. The fact remains that before Agatha disappeared, her husband, Archie Christie, had admitted to having an affair and asked her for a divorce. Sometime after that, one evening, Agatha went missing from their home in Sunningdale, and her […]
This is the first story I read this year that truly resonated with me. No Land to Light On is the story of a young Syrian couple who became separated because of Trump’s ruthless and controversial Muslim ban that went into effect on 27 January 2017. Hadi, a Syrian refugee in the US, had gone […]
Medusa’s Ankles was my first foray into A. S. Byatt’s canon, and I’m amazed by the breadth of her tales! Generally, you wouldn’t expect an anthology by a single author to span across multiple genres, but as David Mitchell mentions in his Introduction, “Byatt’s scholarly knowledge of English literature, combined with her freethinking attitude to […]
I’m going to reread this one day, once I’ve read Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet. It is a series (or more correctly, a cycle, as Zafón called it) I’ve always, always wanted to read. I bought the first three novels while in Sri Lanka back in 2012, and was waiting for […]
I love reading British Library Crime Classics Christmas mystery offerings around this time of the year, and their latest is one madcap riot! 😆 The story, set during WWII, begins with the arrival of Sir Willoughby Keen-Cotton at the Redpaths just before Christmas. Not that it’s an ideal time for Rhoda and Frank Redpath to […]
Red Lips and Bibliomaniacs 