The Overbooked Bibliophile

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “If I told you that I’d killed a man with a glance, would you wait to hear the rest? The why, the how, what happened next? Or would you run from me, this mottled mirror, this body of unusual flesh?” In this fascinating reimagining of the myth of Medusa, author Jessie Burton presents us with a novel feminist twist to a character and story that has, for the most part, featured as one of Perseus’s heroic exploits. Simply put, Perseus has always been the hero and Medusa the vanquished. But Jessie Burton’s Medusa is much more than that. Cursed by the Goddess Athena and transformed into a Gorgon with snakes in place of her once beautiful hair, the once beautiful Medusa now lives on a deserted island with her sisters, Stheno and Euryale,and her dog Argentus. Her transgression? Being raped by Poseidon within the premises of the Temple of Athena.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “We owe it to the dead to keep their memory alive by reminding the world of its responsibility never to forget. For to face the future one has to understand the past.” In 1939, we meet twelve and a half-year-old Mala Szorer in the Polish village of Tarnogrod where she lives with her family – parents, grandfather and siblings. She is happy and hopeful, attending school and dreaming of finishing her education and joining her eldest sister Balla in Warsaw. WW2, anti-Semitic sentiments and the takeover of their village by the German Army lead to her education being halted, Jews being segregated from the Christian population, and her whole family plunged into poverty.

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Benjamin ‘Ben’ Daniels is a journalist presently renting an old apartment in one of Paris’s posh neighborhoods, an arrangement made possible by his old college buddy Nick Miller with whom he has reconnected after a long gap and who is also a resident in the same building. As the novel begins Ben is seen in his apartment awaiting the arrival of his half-sister Jess Hadley. Both Ben and Jess were orphans under the foster care system. Ben, having been adopted by an affluent family has led a comfortable life, received a good education, and though he isn’t quite as successful as he wants to be, is gainfully employed as a journalist. Comparatively, Jess has not had it easy, having been in and out of foster homes all her life and needing to fend for herself. Her recent stint as a bartender did not end well and she finds herself unemployed and in need of a place to lay low for a while. Though Ben isn’t quite thrilled with Jess’s visit, he doesn’t refuse her when she plans to cr...

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Set in AD 74, Elodie Harper’s The Wolf Den is the story of Amara , a prostitute in the lupanar of Pompeii. Amara was not born into slavery. The only child of a Greek doctor in the city of Aphidnai (“Twelfth city of Attica, once the home of Helen of Troy”), she is an educated and intelligent girl whose fortunes were reversed after her father's demise. Sold as a house slave by her mother, she was forced into the life of a concubine before being sold to Felix, who changes her name to Amara and puts her to work as a prostitute in his brothel, The Wolf Den, in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ Seattle-based librarian/bookstagrammer Valentina Baker’s marriage falls apart when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. Amid a painful divorce, she is notified of her estranged mother’s death and her inheritance of her mother's bookstore in London. Valentina’s mother, Eloise, had returned to London leaving Valentina and her father when Valentina was twelve years old and has never been heard from since. Though Valentina has spent most of her life harboring deep sorrow and resentment on account of her mother’s abandonment the news of her mother’s passing shocks and saddens her. 

My Rating: 3.5⭐ The Fairway Players is a local community theatre group based in a small English town. The group is gearing up for the performance of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The founders of the group are Martin Haywood and his wife, Helen who also own and operate The Grange Golf and Country Club. When their granddaughter Poppy is diagnosed with brain cancer, their oncologist suggests a steeply-priced experimental drug which has to be imported from America, the expense completely out of pocket with no insurance covering any part of the cost. Though the Haywards are assumed to be well to do, the sum of money required for the full course of treatment is exorbitant. They appeal to the community for assistance which leads to an all-out crowdfunding effort (A Cure For Poppy) with everyone doing their level best to bring in funds to contribute to the cause. As the story progresses we see doubt and suspicion directed towards the legitimacy of the appeal , the treatment options and the heal...

My Rating: 4.5⭐ In Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter, our narrator (a Bulgarian novelist) takes us through his association with Augustine-Garibaldi (“And so early theology and late revolutionism were brought together.”) or Gaustine as we get to know him. Gaustine is a geriatric psychiatrist who uses his knowledge to treat those suffering from Dementia or Alzheimer’s by creating a safe space for them – a space and time defined by their state of mind, a time they associate with happiness. His “clinic of the past” features rooms that are meticulously designed, each representative of a decade in history. Our narrator assists him in acquiring objects and memorabilia that are to be used in setting up the said facilities- from wall calendars and posters to typewriters and radios to cigarettes and chocolates – no holds barred in recreating a figment of the past that corresponds to the patients' memories- a “protected past”.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw begins with Travis Wren and his efforts to locate Maggie St. James who has been missing for over five years. Maggie is the author of a series of children’s books - 'Eloise and the Foxtail: Foxes and Museums' . The books have been criticized as too dark and gruesome for children having a damaging influence on its young readers. Travis has special abilities and can visualize a person’s past actions and location by touching an object belonging to said person. As a favor to a friend, he has taken Maggie's case despite still being in grief over the death of his sister. In the course of his search, he reaches Klamath National Forest and deeper into the woods he reaches the gate of Pastoral, a commune that is said to have been set up in the 1970s by a group of people who wanted a simple life off the grid and amid nature but has mostly been considered a myth.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ From Hollywood with Love by Scott Meslow is an exploration into the popularity of the romantic comedy (rom-com) genre of movies covering a span of over thirty years starting from the late 1980s through the 1990s to the present day. The author addresses the immense popularity of this genre in the 80s and 90s, followed by a period that saw a decline in interest and the favorable response to romantic comedies in the present day. Not only does the author talks about celebrated studio releases (such as When Harry Met Sally, Love Actually or the more recent Crazy Rich Asians) that are representative of the genre but also takes a look at how contemporary web streaming services have contributed to the revived interest in romantic comedies in today's day and age (citing the example of the To All The Boys I Loved Before series of movies released on Netflix).

My Rating: 4.5⭐ Seventy-year-old Tova Sullivan works the nightshift as a cleaner at Sowell Bay Aquarium. She lives alone, recently widowed and her eighteen-year-old son having disappeared almost thirty years ago. Though financially stable, Tova believes in keeping herself occupied and enjoys her work and the company of the aquatic life in the aquarium, among whom is Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, who was taken in as a rescue and at the beginning of the novel is on Day 1299 of his four-year (1460 day) life span. His observations and ruminations on human beings (which are shared in the first person in snippets throughout the narrative) are laced with humor (with a touch of snark) and wisdom. He is after all a ‘remarkably bright creature’ who also happens to venture out of his tank at nighttime, never exceeding the eighteen minutes beyond which would result in “consequences” as he cannot survive longer than that outside his tank. On one of his nocturnal adventures, Tova ends up savin...

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “There are at least two sides to every story: Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying.” Anna Andrews loves her job as BBC Anchorwoman responsible for presenting the One O’Clock News bulletin. She has held this position for almost two years ever since the previous presenter Cat Jones went on maternity leave. Much to her disappointment Cat returns and resumes her position and Anna is relegated to the role of Correspondent and assigned to cover a case in Blackdown where the body of a local woman has been discovered in the woods. She is reluctant to travel to Blackdown which is revealed to be her hometown and a place she does not want to return to.

My Rating:  3.5⭐ Nina de Gramont's The Christie Affair is a fictionalized account of a chapter from the renowned author Ms. Agatha Christies’s own life. On December 3, 1926, Ms. Agatha Christie disappeared from her home leaving her husband and young daughter behind only to resurface eleven days later at a hotel in Harrogate where she had been staying under an assumed name. Needless to say, her disappearance made national news and led to a nationwide search. To this day there is no public knowledge of the events that transpired over those eleven days.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Set in the not-so-distant future Blake Crouch’s Upgrade revolves around Logan Ramsay, an agent with the Gene Protection Agency (GPA). The GPA tracks the development and application of genetic research to prevent it from being used for any purpose that would be detrimental to the human race. This is a world where the application of genetics is highly regulated and gene modification or editing has been outlawed. Though the Gene Protection Act had effectively ended all private and university-based genetic research, some scientists and researchers have been continuing their work illegally. The GPA is responsible for tracking down and arresting illegal researchers and the closure of all underground research labs/facilities.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ Combining fact and fiction, Reyna Grande’s A Ballad of Love and Glory is a beautifully penned novel set against the backdrop of the Mexican American War (1846-1848). The story begins in March 1846 with Ximena Salome Benitez y Catalan, standing at a port on the Gulf of Mexico watching as Yankee ships pass through the inlet and the cavalry of the Army of Occupation of the United States of America make an entrance.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick." Twyla and Roberta, both eight years old, find themselves wards of the State and placed at St. Bonaventure (St. Bonny’s as it is more commonly referred to by the children). They spend four months together as roommates and slowly become friends keeping each other company and looking out for each other in the classroom, the lunchroom and in the orchard where the senior girls like to tease and bully the younger ones. We are told that the population at the orphanage /shelter is racially diverse but what separates these two girls from the rest is not their race (one of them is black and the other white) but the fact that unlike the other children they are not orphans but have been “dumped” and thus the other children tend to ignore them. The author leaves their racial identities ambiguous alluding to the fact that they belong to different races indirectly (“salt and pepper” as they are referred to by the other childre...

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Liv Reese wakes up in the backseat of a cab in New York with no recollection of how she got there. On returning home she sees two strangers living in her home, no signs of her belongings, her cat or any sign of her having lived there. She is unable to reach her best friend Amy, with whom she had shared the apartment or her boyfriend Marco. She seems to have lost her purse, phone and wallet. All she is carrying is a wad of cash and a bloodied knife wrapped in a t-shirt. She has little messages “Stay Awake”,”Don’t Sleep”,“Don’t Trust Anyone” scrawled across her hands and arms with a ballpoint pen. The last thing Liv remembers is answering her desk phone at work on a summer day a little over two years ago. She remembers nothing of her life between then and the moment she woke up in the cab.

  My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Seventy-seven year old Judith Potts lives on her own in her mansion along the Thames. She compiles crosswords for the national newspapers for a living, enjoys her whiskey, loves jigsaw puzzles and swims the river in the nude when she pleases. While swimming one evening she hears a gunshot echo across the garden of her neighbor, local art gallery owner Stefan Dunwoody. She calls the police and upon initial investigation, they don’t find anything that would warrant suspicion and assume that Mr. Dunwoody is probably away for the duration. Judith, not entirely convinced, goes exploring and finds the body of her neighbor at the base of his garden on the other side of a dam along the river. “Murders just didn’t happen in Marlow.”

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Jennifer Saint’s beautiful debut novel is the reimagining of the Greek mythological story of Ariadne, Princess of Crete, daughter of King Minos and his queen Pasiphae. As a young girl, she is fond of dance, loves her younger sister Phaedra and even helps to take care of her brother Asterion (the Minotaur) when he was a baby, but unable to bear his bestiality as he grows. She grows up listening to her nursemaid’s stories about the gods, goddesses and mortal heroes whose lives have become legends. She is particularly moved by the story of Perseus and Medusa and the story behind how Medusa became a Gorgon. She is witness to her mother’s suffering brought upon by the birth of the Minotaur conceived as an act of revenge exacted by the gods against her father. She ponders over her own fate in a world where gods and men rule and women have no say in the decisions crucial to their lives and are but pawns in the hands of the men who control their fate.

  My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor is an epistolary novella that features a series of fictional letters between Max Eisenstein, a German-American art dealer of Jewish faith living in San Francisco and his friend and business partner, Martin Schulse who has recently returned to Germany with his family. Together they owned and operated Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries in San Francisco.

  My Rating:  3.5⭐️ Ariel Pryce, a newly married woman in her mid-forties, wakes up in her hotel room in Lisbon only to find her husband, John Wright missing with no note or clue as to where he might have gone. John was on a work trip to Lisbon and Ariel had accompanied him with plans to spend some quality time together. They’ve known each other for barely a year and we assume that this is their first trip together. Ariel approaches the hotel staff who have no information on her husband’s whereabouts.

My Rating: 2.5⭐️ At the beginning of the novel we meet Liesl Weiss, second in command to Christopher Wolfe, director of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the university library. Both Christopher and Liesl have been with the library for decades. When Christopher suffers a stroke she is called back from her sabbatical to act as interim director. However, she finds herself in the middle of a mystery when she discovers a rare manuscript that was scheduled for viewing has vanished from the safe in Christopher’s office.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ “Thousands of islands rise from the rivers’ rich silts, Crowned with forests of mangrove, rising on stilts. This is the Sundarban, where great rivers give birth; To a vast jungle that joins Oceans and Earth.” Jungle Nama by Amitav Ghosh marks the renowned author’s foray into verse. The story of Bon Bibi was featured as an integral part of the narrative in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Hungry Tide. The legend of Bon Bibi is an important part of the culture and folklore of the Sundarbans with shrines devoted to the deity found in pockets of the area.