Category Books
We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart
We Do What We Do in the Dark, a bit reminiscent of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, is a coming-of-age story where the main focus is on a lesbian love affair. Mallory is in her first year of college when she falls hard for one of the professors at her university, who is almost twice her […]
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a unique novel, and it’s going to be a highlight for me this year! The seventy-year-old Tova Sullivan has been working the night-shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium for a while now. Tova is financially stable, but cleaning the aquarium spotless has helped Tova keep busy as she tries to get […]
Magpie by Elizabeth Day
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 […]
Groundskeeping by Lee Cole
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 […]
Post After Post-Mortem by E. C. R. Lorac
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 […]
Tin Camp Road by Ellen Airgood
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 by Lisa Barr
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 […]
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
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, […]
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
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 by Anthony Berkeley
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 […]
Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby
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 […]
The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
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 by Nina de Gramont
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 […]
No Land to Light On by Yara Zgheib
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: Selected Stories by A. S. Byatt
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 […]
Red Lips and Bibliomaniacs 