Evening Stars Susan Mallery Harlequin/Mira ISBN: 978-0-7738-1613-8 Nina Wentworth lives on Blackberry Island, a small community off the coast of Washington. She’s a thirty-year-old nurse in a pediatrician’s office, but her dream is to be a doctor. That’s only the beginning of the sacrifices she has made as primary caretaker […]
There’s nothing quite like a great scare. Whether it’s the anticipation of monsters under your bed or the freaky feeling of shadowy figures hiding just around a darkened corner, being scared is certainly an adrenaline rush we enjoy. What intensifies the thrill of a great scare for us is […]
Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar Kelly Oxford itbooks – an imprint of HarperCollins ISBN: 978-0-06-210222-5 In this humorous memoir, comedienne Kelly Oxford writes chapter-long anecdotes from her own life, starting when she was six years old and attempted to direct the neighborhood kids in a Star Wars theater […]
The Laura Line by Crystal Allen HarperCollins Children’s Books ISBN: 978-0-06-199274-2 Middle grade fiction author Crystal Allen has recently released her second novel entitled The Laura Line. Laura Dyson and her best friend Sage seem to be the misfits at Royal Middle School. They are teased by the popular […]
The Year of the Gadfly Jennifer Miller Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978-0-547-54859-3 —♦— Fourteen-year-old Iris Dupont lost her best friend to suicide. She struggles to deal with this reality, so in an effort to help Iris move on, her parents move the family from Boston to the small New England […]
There’s nothing quite like a great character. These are the fictional folks who leave indelible impressions on readers. They are the folks we root for. And, many times, they aren’t always the hero. In many respects, great secondary characters are more beloved than the main character. After all, what would […]
Spoilers ahead: Sirius Black was not, in fact, hellbent on killing Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban. Oh and Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear? Well, let’s just say that there was far more behind his quiet stammer and poor-little-country-boy persona than he led us all to believe. Some plot twists […]
There are books we love. There are, of course, books that resonate with us. There are books that make us laugh, make us outraged, motivate us to effect change. And then, there are books with the transformative power to alter the paths of our lives, that speak to us so […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.