In the Face of the Sun is an engrossing family saga filled with heartbreak and love, victory, forgiveness, and loss, and a wonderful character study of several unforgettable women. It is 1968, and a pregnant Frankie Saunders is leaving Chicago, abandoning an abusive marriage to the violent, controlling Jackson with the help of a ride…
The Last Daughter is an unusual, intriguing novel featuring time travel, magical artifacts and an interesting defense of Anne Lovell. It’s well-written, well-researched, engrossing and incredibly original – but the magical world-building is somewhat weak. The plot is split between two different storylines which eventually intertwine in the last half of the novel. The first…
The rhythms of the split-PoV, split era inspirational romance Make You Feel My Love are well-worn in several places. There are comfortable spots and tropes here, but when told in Robin Lee Hatcher’s comfortable, practiced and folksy style, they’re like the reading version of eating a bowl of chocolate pudding. It’s about comfort and spiritual…
The Curator’s Daughter is a story of how women often find themselves in the most impossible situations and manage to rise above them to create a better world for themselves, those they love and all who come after them. Hanna Tillich is not a Nazi, but she is reluctantly employed by them. She worked all…
The Paris Apartment is a compelling story told in dual timelines. The first is 1938 – 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Paris, and the second is 2017 in Paris and England after an apartment, unseen since World War II, is opened and its contents create more questions than answers. It’s 2017 and Aurelia (Lia)…
The Last Night in London is an enthralling story about the bonds of friendship, the wonder of falling in love and the often painful experience of holding on to hope in the midst of unexpected hardship. It begins with an exhibit. Ninety-nine-year-old Precious Dubose had been a model for decades and kept many of the…
Fans of historical fiction are in for a treat with Wild Women and the Blues, a dual timeline novel about Jazz Age Chicago with its beautiful, fun but dark and dangerous world of juice joints, dance girls and racketeering, and a young man searching for redemption in twenty-first century America. Sawyer Hayes’ life changed in…
The Lost Apothecary, the début novel from Sarah Penner, is a story told in dual timelines – the present day and 1791. It tells the story of a modern day woman uncovering the secrets of an apothecary who, in 1791, used her skills to rid women of the men who plagued their lives. It is…
Marsha Canham’s work is nothing if not painstakingly researched and beautifully actualized. The Mark of the Rose brings us back to the 1200s with ease, then flashes us forward to the present day, taking us into the lives of one special woman and her ancestor. But the two halves of its story don’t feel truly…
The charming writing of Amy Sue Nathan and the even more charming heroine she gives us deflect all of The Last Bathing Beauty’s sins. Though the plot has some predictable points, the utterly disarming story is a page turner and a great summer read. In the summer of 1951, eighteen year old Betty Stern is…