the particular sadness of lemon cake For nine year old Rose, having her mother bake her favourite lemon cake for her birthday is a real treat, until the day she bites into it and can feel all of her mother’s despair and sadness in the otherwise tasty morsel. At first confused, Rose has trouble grasping […]
Little Black Lies by Sharon BoltonI read this book in a day. I got home from work and sat down on the sofa with a cup of tea and this book to pass time before dinner. When I finally looked up and away from the page, the sun was rising. Every sentence was perfect. The […]
Eating DirtBy Charlotte Gill Imagine a life of dirty, tough work out in the backcountry. Imagine that the wilderness is home for eight months of the year and that you can’t have a proper shower or get any real privacy during this time. Then imagine that this is the life you choose for yourself. This […]
The Buried Giant The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a fantasy novel that covers the journey of Axl and Beatrice, a couple who set off on a journey to find their son, who they have not seen for some time, and actually do not remember very well. As the story moves along with their […]
Miriam Toews has this way of writing lines that are so beautiful that sometimes I have to close her books for a moment just to marvel at them. All My Puny Sorrowsis a book that is full of such moments; alternating equally between being eloquently wise, wickedly funny and jaggedly heartbreaking. In every one […]
By Mary Roach While there are plenty of books that cover the political and human impacts of war, we rarely see and examination of more unusual aspects of maintaining a military force. Grunt by Mary Roach isn’t about new guns and tanks, drones and missiles. This is the kind of stuff that most people don’t […]
Boundless By Kathleen Winter When Kathleen Winter is offered a chance to journey through the relatively unknown waters of the Northwest Passage, she responds truthfully, “My bags are already packed.” As a writer, Winter is always ready to embark on a journey and she’s fascinated by the mysteries of the Arctic. In her memoir, Boundless, […]
The Paris Wife Paula McLain The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, is a lilting story of the life of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Written from Hadley’s perspective, we get an inside look to what it was like to be a woman in the 1920’s married to a chauvinistic, self-obsessed man who […]
The Kill by Jane Casey I read a lot of mysteries, but surprisingly I have not read anything by Jane Casey before. I’m not sure how I missed her over the years, but I am really glad I stumbled upon her books. The Kill is the fifth book in Jane Casey’s fantastic Maeve Kerrigan’s series. […]
A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria SchwabJust when I thought that there was nothing new under the sun, I stumbled upon “A Darker Shade of Magic” by Victoria Schwab. At first glance, this fantasy has many elements that might be familiar to readers of the genre: invented languages, magic, a large cast of characters, […]