On Sherry Southerland’s sixty-third birthday, her friend Lorena gives her an unusual present: a visit to a virtual reality studio in Hollywood which can replicate two weeks in any time period. Sherry, nostalgic for a missed romantic connection from her youth, chooses 1969 London. But to their surprise, the two women actually travel through time….
Obsession can be a powerful thing. It can help us do great deeds or it can be the cessation of greatness. An obsessed character can be a fantastic, multifaceted personage or a cardboard cutout with only one side painted in. In the case of this novel the author manages to land her obsessed character somewhere…
If any book proves the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” it’s the amazing YA novel, Eleanor and Park. Going by the cutesy, cartoon drawing on the dust jacket, one would expect a light, quirky, first-love story geared toward the teen set. Instead, this book will crush you, showing how life can be…
Starcrossed lovers show up often enough in romance, but rarely with such convincing emotion as in The Sleeping Night. Barbara Samuel’s tale of an interracial couple in postwar Texas takes readers through a rollercoaster of emotion as we see her characters dealing with love, loss, and poisonous bigotry. I felt absolutely wrung out after reading…
Flavia de Luce, girl sleuth, makes a roaring first appearance in Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. The first in a mystery series set in 1950s England, this is hands down, the best mystery I’ve read this year. I love Flavia de Luce. I should start by saying there isn’t a…
Betty Lake couldn’t be more excited for her future – a girl with little money and no formal training, she never thought she’d travel much beyond her own front door. But the war gave women a chance to do things they had never done before, and she is getting to travel with the USO to…
This book gave me the mother of all headaches. Most likely because my brow was knitted together from the “What the…?” face I made during the entire reading. Sadly to say, the author took a rather interesting premise (which she got from her editor: see acknowledgments) and turned it into a disaster. Cathy Voorhees just…
It took me over 10 years to read this book. Well, let me explain. It sat on my TBR shelf for 10 years before I finally decided to grab some of the oldest (and dustiest) books and read them. I wish I had read this book when I first bought it because I had cheated…
Terri Harrington’s Flashback may not be the best-written time travel romance I’ve ever read or the deepest, but it is my favorite. It’s a simple story, one which takes a different approach to the material than many others. It’s not concerned with the mechanics and complications of time travel. It doesn’t spend time showing how…
What to say, what to say? I’ve been waiting to read Tatiana and Alexander since September 23, 2001 at 4:35 PM, give or take a few minutes. That’s when I finished Simon’s wonderful, heartbreaking epic story The Bronze Horseman. If you’ve read that book, you’ll know why I immediately needed to get my hands on…