“Nights like this, she knows this is real, she’s not imagining it. The fear is bright, animal, sure. Pure blue at the heart of a flame.” “But right now, there’s no space for stories.” Rounding out my Booker predictions for the weekend is Roisín O’Donnell’s debut novel, Nesting (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2025 –Continue reading “NESTING – Roisín O’Donnell”
Tag Archives: Book reviews
OUR EVENINGS – Alan Hollinghurst
“I lay there for agonized hours as the miracle of being in bed at him was nibbled away by the heat and the hangover and the longing.” This year, I decided to get “a jump” on potential Booker books, and Alan Hollinghurst’s (a previous Booker winner) new novel, Our Evenings (Random House 2024) was aContinue reading “OUR EVENINGS – Alan Hollinghurst”
BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL – V.E. Schwab
“It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.” Toxic lesbian vampires. That’s how V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (2025 Tor) was marketed.Continue reading “BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL – V.E. Schwab”
TWIST – Colum McCann
“We are all shards in the smash-up.” “Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.” As y’all know, I read the Booker longlist every year. Sometimes, I try to get a jump on things by reading eligible books that smell Bookery. (If you follow the Booker Prize, you’ll know what that means.) The buzz aroundContinue reading “TWIST – Colum McCann”
ANY TROPE BUT YOU – Victoria Lavine
I wanted a cute, candy read. A Hallmark movie in book form. Set in the remote wilderness of Alaska with a romance author from California and the hunky lumberjack son of the proprietor of the resort she’s staying at? That sounds like a delicious candy book. And Victoria Lavine’s Any Trope But You (Atria 2025)Continue reading “ANY TROPE BUT YOU – Victoria Lavine”
MY FRIENDS – FREDRIK BACKMAN
“Twenty-five years later he still wishes for the same thing, that he was fourteen years old and that the world was full of broken clocks. “As seventeen-year-olds they would sleep next to each other almost every night in the foster home, with ice cream stains on their clothes and each other’s laughter in their lungs,Continue reading “MY FRIENDS – FREDRIK BACKMAN”
RHYTHM OF WAR – Brandon Sanderson
“If we slow down,” Jasnah said, “the past catches up to us. History is like that, always gobbling up the present.” The year of Sanderson continues and while I may have had a rather slow month of reading in May, I did finish Rhythm of War (Tor 2020). Book four of The Stormlight Archivemay veryContinue reading “RHYTHM OF WAR – Brandon Sanderson”
TOUGH LUCK – Sandra Dallas
When I read John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry, I called it Lonesome Dove meets Calamity Jane. I loved everything about it. When I saw he’d blurbed Sandra Dallas’s Tough Luck (St. Martin’s Press 2025), which is marketed as a homage to True Grit, the new release was immediately placed on my radar. (A hugeContinue reading “TOUGH LUCK – Sandra Dallas”
HOMESEEKING – Karissa Chen
Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking (Putnam 2025) is a novel of choices and resilience, spanning 1938 – 2008 in the lives of dual souls divided by distance and circumstance. Suji/Suchi/Sue and Doudou/Haiwen/Howard became ready friends as children and that friendship quickly blossomed into a deep love that would act as a magnetic force, pulling them toward eachContinue reading “HOMESEEKING – Karissa Chen”
HAPPY LAND – Dolen Perkins-Valdez
I’ve been sitting on this review for a bit, trying to figure out how best to condense my thoughts into a relatively small space. (I’ve also been toying with the possibility of changing how I review/react, but that’s really neither here nor there.) As per usual, it’ll likely just be bookish babbling, but I encourageContinue reading “HAPPY LAND – Dolen Perkins-Valdez”
A Girl Named Tommi 