The Overbooked Bibliophile

My Rating: 4.5⭐ “I had come to Hillview looking for a hero and instead I'd found a villain.” Joe Talbert is a student at the University of Minnesota working on an assignment for his English class. He visits Hillview Manor, a nursing home for the elderly, intending to make acquaintance with an elderly person on whom he could base his assignment - a biographical account of a person’s life highlighting all its significant moments. Once there, initially discouraged on account of most of the residents being in poor health or unable to converse much, he is pointed in the direction of Carl Iverson, convicted rapist and murderer incarcerated for thirty years and recently paroled to the nursing home, terminally ill with cancer and with not much time left to live.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ In 1949, twenty-one-year-old Rashka Morgenstern emigrates to New York from Berlin following the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Her only surviving family is her mother’s brother Friedrich Landau, her Feter Fritz, an Auschwitz survivor. Her mother was a prolific artist who perished in the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camps and her father had passed away when she was only two years old. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Rashka and her Feter Fritz find a place to live in New York and attempt to acclimatize to their new circumstances in the aftermath of their harrowing experiences during WW2.

My Rating:⭐⭐ Spent my day listening to the audio narration by Stephanie Racine. The narration was impressive, the build-up engaging, the child abuse, animal cruelty and spousal abuse disturbing and the twist left me nauseated and ruined the book for me! Needless to say, my least favorite Feeney novel to date!

My Rating:  3.5⭐ Audiobook:4/5 Plot:3/5 A young woman, Julie Stender, is brutally murdered in her apartment in downtown Copenhagen with her face mutilated and all signs pointing to the fact that she probably knew her murderer. Police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. In the course of their investigation, they interview Julie’s landlady Esther de Laurenti, who is in the middle of is writing a novel with the main character based on Julie, who seems to have shared some significant details of her life with Esther. What is shocking is the fact that the details of Julie’s murder are uncannily similar to events described in Esther’s manuscript- a manuscript shared with only a few others in a private writers’ group.

My Rating:  4.5⭐ In January 1958, a young Jamaican by the name of Hubert Bird sails to Southampton in search of a bright future like many others of the Windrush Generation. He finds employment and has to endure blatant racism and discrimination both in the workplace and in society in general, but remains hopeful. Hubert meets his future wife Joyce, falls in love and marries her - an inter-racial marriage that is not accepted by Joyce’s family. A hardworking and honest man, loving husband and devoted father to two children, Hubert settles down in Bromley with his wife and family.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Harlan Coben’s "The Match" continues the story of Wilde, the protagonist of "The Boy from the Woods" who was abandoned in the wilderness of the Ramapo Mountains in New Jersey as a child. Branded ‘feral’ and a modern-day ‘Mowgli’ by the media , he had barely any memory of his life or family before his days in the woods. Almost thirty-five years after being rescued and placed in foster care and with military experience and a career in private security behind him, Wilde, now in his early forties, is searching for clues that would help him find out more about his past and his true parentage.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Annie Hartnett’s debut novel follows the Alabama based Babbitt family - ten-year-old Elvis, her older sister fifteen-year-old Lizzie, their father Frank and their family dog Boomer as they come to terms with the death of the girls’ mother and Frank’s wife, Eva Rose Babbitt who died from drowning in the Chattahoochee river after sleepwalking into it. “Mom always said we needed a cake to mark every new beginning, and whether it was a birthday or a first day of school or a new moon, rabbits mean good luck to a new start.”

My Rating:  2.5⭐ Housed in a derelict library that has seen better times, The House of Marvellous Books is a publishing house on the verge of financial ruin. £1 million debt, a leaking roof, rodent infestation (despite the faithful library cat Moriarty patrolling the premises), outstanding payments to writers and the competition trying to poach their more popular writers are just a few of the problems The House is facing. There is a rumor of the library having in its possession a valuable medieval manuscript that even has the Vatican willing to pay a handsome amount, which would help save the establishment if only it were to be found. A new hire expected to save the day turns out to add to the mess and eventually, a dubious Russian company takes over, promising to turn the business around which raises more suspicion than confidence. Will the publishing house be saved or will the changes being introduced prove to be a final nail in the coffin for The House of Marvellous Books? ...

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “When does a migrant become a refugee?” Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins spent seven years covering the war in Afghanistan. In the course of his work, he meets and befriends Omar, who acts as his guide and translator. Despite his serving as an interpreter for the Special Forces and having worked with USAID, Omar’s efforts to emigrate to the USA are unsuccessful on account of his being unable to procure all necessary documentation. As the situation in Afghanistan worsens and fearing backlash from the Taliban, Omar plans to emigrate to Europe traveling via the refugee route. He is reluctant to leave without Laila, who he loves but whose family opposes their marriage. Eventually he has to leave without Laila, promising to come back for her.

My rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “She exists like an extra in a movie, woven seamlessly into a scene, behaving as if she had always been there, a retiree thrilled to take care of her grandchildren in her golden years, living the rest of her days with a frugality baked into her bones.” Our protagonist is a sixty-five-year-old Korean assassin who goes by the name of Hornclaw and has been in the business of “disease-control” for forty-five years and counting, associated with the “agency” she helped build with her late mentor Ryu. She is smart and precise, approaching her target with an almost clinical detachment focusing on the “how” of the extermination of the “vermin” in question and not bothering the “why”.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Twenty-nine-year-old Shea Collins, resident of Claire Lake, Oregon, is a receptionist in a doctor's office by day and a true-crime blogger by night. With a traumatic experience in her childhood and a recent divorce behind her, she mostly keeps to herself, occasionally visiting her sister, but spends most of her evenings devoted her blog ”The Book of Cold Cases” where she researches unsolved cases.

My Rating:  3.5 ⭐ “You Have a Friend in 10A” by Maggie Shipstead is a collection of ten very well-written, thought-provoking short stories.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ Nine individuals receive a list of nine names printed on a sheet of paper in the mail. One of the names on the list is their own and the remaining eight are names of random strangers - the present owner of a family-owned inn, an FBI agent, the mistress of a rich man, a struggling actor, a suburban dad, an English professor, a retired businessman, an oncology nurse and a singer-songwriter- two of whom are female and the remaining seven male, each of whom reside in different locations across the country and have no apparent connection, either personally or professionally. Junk mail? Advertising gimmick? A harmless prank? Apparently not.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Twenty-one-year-old Pandora “Dora” Blake lives and works in her late parents' antiquities shop in Georgian London. Her parents had been renowned antiquarians specializing in Grecian artifacts and had made their living excavating tombs in South-Eastern Europe. Their untimely death in a mishap during an excavation twelve years ago left Dora orphaned and under the care of her unscrupulous and corrupt uncle Hezekiah Blake who promptly took over the shop and is responsible for its present state of disrepute, dealing mostly in forgeries and objects with not much historical significance. Dora aspires to be a jewelry designer and spends time honing her craft with her faithful pet magpie Hermes by her side, despite the constant beratement and ridicule of her uncle who would rather be rid of her.

My Rating:   2.5⭐ Twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker lives in the wetlands of Bledsoe, Georgia with her parents and is the youngest in the family with three older siblings, fifteen-year-old Peter, Freddy who has an aptitude for science, and Sarah-Anne who hardly speaks and we assume is developmentally challenged. Their life at home isn’t the most fulfilling, barely able to afford the most basic of necessities. Their father has a temper and is for the most part unemployed and their mother hardly interacts with any of her children except for Sarah-Anne. Kay’s youngest sister, Elizabeth died shortly after birth and is buried under an oak tree in their front yard. Her mother has never been the same since.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thirty-five-year-old Amber Reynolds wakes up in a coma in a hospital room with no recollection of the car accident that got her there. Though unconscious to the world outside and unable to react or respond to any stimulus and with gaps in her memory of events preceding her accident, she is aware and alert of what is transpiring in her hospital room and the people who are frequent visitors and those responsible for her care – her nurses, medical staff, husband Paul, her sister Claire and an unidentified man who rifles through her phone, taunts her and medicates her. Who is this person? Who is responsible for her present condition? Is her husband to be trusted? Is her sister keeping secrets from her? Was her accident truly an accident or does someone want her dead?

Rating:  3.5 ⭐ “The fact that our daily activity hinged on the repeated description—description, elaboration, and delineation—of matters that were, outside, generally subject to euphemism and elision.” Our unnamed protagonist (who is also our narrator) has recently taken up a one-year contractual position as an interpreter with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, moving from New York to The Hague, and is still in the process of adjusting to her new life. She is professionally tasked with interpreting for the high profile case of a former West African President, who is being tried for horrific war crimes. Her interaction with the former President was not just limited to her removed presence behind a glass-fronted soundproof booth. She is also required to sit in and interpret for him during his private meetings with his legal counsel.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.” The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki revolves around the once aristocratic and wealthy Makioka family, namely the sisters Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko, Taeko (fondly referred to as “Koi-san” as per custom, meaning “small daughter”), who despite having lost most of their wealth over time, strive to maintain a way of life and uphold the traditional customs of an era slowly fading into history. The novel spans the period between the autumn of 1936 to April 1941. It is a slow-paced and detail-oriented depiction of life in Japanese polite society in the years leading up to WW2. The narrative alludes to historically significant events occurring in that pe...

My Rating:  4.5⭐ On an August afternoon in 1975, a thirteen-year-old girl (our narrator) drags a suitcase up the stairs to an apartment belonging to her biological parents. She is 'returned' to her family by her adoptive parents, the only family she has ever known and whom she believed to be her true parents. This family, this apartment just a bus ride away from her seaside home and her new siblings are all alien to her. This family is related to her adoptive father and she was adopted by Signora Adalgisa when she was an infant of six months – an arrangement mutually agreed upon by both sets of parents. The circumstances surrounding her 'return' remain a mystery to her. She worries for the health of her adoptive mother. Is she sick? Is she even alive? Will she ever return to the safe, happy cocoon that was once her home? 

My Rating:  4.5⭐ The Perfect Crime is a unique selection of short stories (some longer than the others), featuring authors from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, revolving around themes of murder and mayhem, clandestine affairs, betrayals, hate crimes, corruption, blackmail and revenge.

My Rating:  3.5⭐ On New Year’s Eve 1999 four teenage girls working the night shift are attacked in a Blockbuster Video store in Linden, New Jersey just as they are closing up for the night. Three of the girls and their male supervisor are found dead with only one survivor. “Good night, pretty girl.” Ella Monroe survives the ordeal but remembers the words whispered to her by the assailant as she lost consciousness. The suspect was the boyfriend of one of the girls, Vince Whitaker, who was arrested but later released for lack of evidence. Once evidence was gathered, he was nowhere to be found as has been absconding ever since.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ An Asian American couple, Tam and Tony Kwan are mending the cracks in their marriage and on the cusp of adopting a child from a Chinese orphanage. Tragedy strikes when Tony and his cousin Mia are killed in an accident near Mia’s home. Tam is surprised to know that Tony had been with Mia at the time of the accident, having been on the phone with him at that moment and it becomes apparent to Tam that Tony had been lying to her about his true whereabouts. Tam, in shock over her husband’s death, is also now responsible for Mia’s five-year-old daughter Angela. Tam was once close to Mia and her daughter Angela when she was just a baby, but after a falling out they had been estranged for almost five years. Tam was also not aware that Tony had reconnected with Mia. 

My Rating:  3.5⭐ Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby is a collection of twenty-one short stories with strong feminist overtones. The stories are varied in plot, genre and tone -from dark and satirical, humorous and laugh out loud to wise and insightful.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. -Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken” Our trip to New Hampshire would have been incomplete without a visit to The Frost Place in Franconia. The poet lived here with his family until 1920. Presently a museum (since 1976), it also hosts a residency program for emerging American poets allowing them to live and write in the house during summer months.

  My Rating: 4.5⭐ The ghosts of the Maple Street Cemetery in the fictional town of Everton, New Hampshire are governed by a strict set of rules and restrictions for its occupants and the most important ones are as follows: Rule#1: No Meddling in the affairs of the living. Rule#2: If you stop caring about the events of the living, you’re in direct violation of the rules of the cemetery, and your soul shrivels up before it disappears. However, the rules do not prevent the ghosts from seeing everything that is going on in the lives of the residents of Everton. With wit, wisdom, humor and a healthy dose of sarcasm woven into their commentary, they proceed to narrate the story of the Starling family of Everton and their community.