While researching her mother’s life story, the youngest of Rida‘s four daughters slowly comes to learn more about her spirited, non-traditional, sassy, self-confident parent in well-known YA author Cynthia Voigt’s first novel for adults in many years. But as brassy originality clashes with unusual allusions and some occasionally hard-to-love characters, is the end result worth…
Given the steady-paced, un-romance-like beginning, I was prepared to place The One True Love of Alice-Ann in the general Inspirational Fiction category. After the first chapters, however, the romantic pace picks up and provides a lovely story of how a young girl learns to distinguish between affectionate friendship and mature and lasting love. It’s Alice-Ann…
My parents were big fans of 1940s and 1950s cinema and those films hold a high nostalgia factor for me. I love the fashions, the glamour and glitz and the dramatized emotions. And the language: “Aw, shucks!” and “Gee, whiz!” spoken in place of “F” bombs but with equal fervor always bring a smile to…
A trio of young women figure out just what it means to let go of what lies behind and anticipate what lies ahead in A Bridge Across the Ocean, a tale of love, death and new beginnings. The story enthralled me so much that immediately upon finishing it I went to the computer to check…
World War II is a period in history that fascinates me. Every time I read a book set during this bleak period, I learn something new. In The Orphan’s Tale, author Pam Jenoff explores the role German circuses played in hiding Jewish people and smuggling them out of Germany. Since I absolutely love circuses and…
In Farleigh Field is a standalone murder mystery with a patina of romance set in Kent involving MI5 operatives and Bletchley Park decoders during World War II. Simply knowing this sold me on the book, and Ms. Bowen delivers on the promise of the premise with an exciting story. She’s really a master of the…
I loved this book when I first read it in 2012. I picked it up again for our blog on Activist Heroines and fell hard all over again. This is the story of Lulu Davies, a pilot for the English Air Transport Auxiliary, the only organization that allowed women to fly planes in WWII. She…
A Kiss to Build a Dream On is a story of the much-lauded women civilian pilots, employed to ferry military aircraft by the US Air Force during World War II. Only very experienced pilots with more than five hundred flying hours under their belt were hired, and employing women freed up men for combat overseas….
The Queen’s Accomplice is the sixth entry in the author’s World War II era mystery series featuring Maggie Hope, a former MIT mathematics graduate student and current secret operative for the British government. Over the course of the series Maggie has moved from working in Winston Churchill’s office to training in Scotland to missions in…
For the longest time, Susanna Kearsley, Lauren Willig and Susan Meissner were the only authors I regularly encountered who wrote dual timeline novels. However, they seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. I love this device, so I’m certainly not complaining. In fact, I was quite eager to read Secrets of Nanreath Hall, with…