The Overbooked Bibliophile

My Rating: 4.5⭐ “And then there is a scream. Ragged and terrified.” Australian author Winifred ‘Freddie’ Kincaid is in Boston on a writers’ scholarship and is spending time in the reading room of Boston Public Library, seeking inspiration for her next book when a piercing scream shatters the silence and becomes a conversation starter for Freddie and the three other people sharing the table – psychology student Marigold Anastas, law student Whit Metters and published author Cain McLeod (initially dubbed Freud Girl, Heroic Chin and Handsome Man respectively by Freddie, based on her observations). Initially, the source of the scream is not revealed until the next day when it is made public that the body of a young woman, who worked for a local tabloid, had been found. As the story progresses, the four of them become friends and find themselves embroiled in the mystery surrounding the death of the young woman and it is revealed that one of them is connected to the murder.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ “All experience adds up to a life lived as only you could. I feel sure the day will come when you can say: this is my life.” Sentaro Tsujii, once an aspiring writer, now works in the Doraharu shop making and selling dorayaki, a Japanese sweet made with pancakes and sweet bean paste. This is not his chosen vocation and his working in the shop is a means of paying off his previous debts to his employer. Having previously served a two-year prison sentence, he is also aware that his checkered past limits his options in terms of employment opportunities. He is not content with his life and listlessly passes his days. One day he meets seventy-six-year-old Tokue Yoshii, a Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) survivor who has lived in a leper’s community, ostracized from mainstream society since she was diagnosed at the age of fourteen. 

                          My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Sparring Partners by John Grisham is a collection of three novellas, each of which is very well-written, distinctive in setting, theme and tone and makes for an intriguing read. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and would definitely recommend it to both longtime fans of Grisham and also as an interesting introduction to those who are yet to read any of his novels.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ Fifty-four-year-old Sophie Bernstein runs an independent bookstore in the Washington DC area. Snapshot of her current situation-Jamal, her store manager is off to law school, her events coordinator /aspiring writer Clemi just booked a controversial poet who she suspects is her biological father to speak at the store, recently fired employee Florence who fancied herself a soothsayer uttered a dire prophecy in her ear, an interested party is contacting her to buy the bookshop, her store vacuum cleaner gave out (once again) and a customer’s dog scared another customer’s baby which leads to a potential lawsuit. Sophie is at her wit's end in juggling it all.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ “Remember, feelings are never simple. Revenge is inextricably linked to a bad conscience; guilt goes hand in hand with resentment at having felt pressured to do the thing one feels guilty about. A double-edged sword, which makes the bearer both victim and executioner.” Three bodies are discovered floating in different fountains across downtown Copenhagen in quick succession. Autopsy reveals all the victims bled out from symmetrical wounds inflicted across their arms and legs- wounds caused by a mysterious weapon. As the narrative progresses, it is revealed that all three victims were connected through their association with “The Butterfly House “, a residential psychiatric facility for children and teenagers which closed down two years ago. Copenhagen homicide detectives Jeppe Korner and Torben Falck are assigned to the case. Korner’s partner, Annette Werner, on maternity leave and itching to resume active duty, adds to the efforts and conducts her own investigation bas...

My Rating: 3.5⭐ “Adriana knew how to bring me back, to all that I had wanted to leave.” In Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Sister’s Story we revisit our unnamed protagonist her younger sister Adriana, from the author’s previous novel , A Girl Returned. Our narrator, once raised by relatives but returned to her birth parents at the age of thirteen has always felt like an outsider among her siblings and parents. Adriana, her sister, younger than her by three years was the only person to whom she was close and who was protective of her. Our narrator has strived and has been successful in charting a path for herself that enabled her to break away from her working-class upbringing. As the story begins she is now teaching literature at a university in Grenoble. She is interrupted by a phone call in the middle of a class and immediately decides to travel back home to the coastal city of Pescara in the Abruzzo region of Italy, where Adriana is now fighting for her life after being seriously inju...

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Kit had survived by keeping a keen and suspicious eye on the present—planning was pointless, regret even more so. No patience for mystery, she dealt in concretes.” In 1976, nineteen-year-old Kit Walker flees from the scene of an armed robbery leaving her partner Manuel “Manny” Romero behind. Kit, at the time of breaking away from Manny, was pregnant and saw an open opportunity to escape from the toxic and abusive and criminal partnership and took it. Kit and Manny were dubbed the “Texaco Twosome” and were wanted for other robberies they had committed. In 1970, Manny, then in his late 20s befriended Kit when she was barely thirteen years old, a runaway abandoned by her mother as a child and moving through the foster care system. Manny, a small-time criminal and conman, grooms Kit to become his partner in crime and their relationship gradually develops into a more exploitative one.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ Simon and Isabel, “Sigh” and “Bell”, two “solitary misanthropes” move into a home at the base of a mountain in the Irish countryside with their dogs Voss and Pip. Having quit their respective jobs and given up their “autonomous lives” they live on their social welfare checks and dwindling savings - a conscious decision they have taken neither out of any compulsion nor out of any particularly overwhelming discontent with their “autonomous" existence. “A refuge, a cult, a church of two; this was their experiment.”

My rating: 4.5⭐ “My life was written for me from the moment the name was given to me. Or it was not. That is the true beauty. That is the intent. We can practice all we want, telling and retelling the same story, but the story that comes out of your mouth, from your brush, is one that only you can tell. So let it be. Let your story be yours, and my story be mine.”

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Firefighter Holt Davidson returns to his hometown in Thompsonville, Colorado after over twenty years for his mother’s funeral after she commits suicide by hanging herself from a tree. While sorting through his mother’s belongings in his childhood home he finds an old Polaroid photo of a dead man, an old music box, a love letter and a gun hidden underneath the floorboards of his mother’s room. His mother Vivian was a devout church-going woman and a kindergarten teacher who raised both her children as a single mother after Holt’s father abandoned them before he was even born. His older sister Ophelia who he has not seen for over thirty years had been institutionalized on account of mental illness when Holt was a child, though Holt does have some fond memories of her. His mother’s suicide and the discovery of these hidden objects raise questions in Holt’s mind. 

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Set in the depression-era South, The Saints of Swallow Hill by Donna Everhart gives us a look into the turpentine industry and the people employed in the work camps around the pine forests. The story revolves around Rae Lynn Cobb and Delwood ‘Del’ Reese both of whom find themselves under the employ of the Swallow Hill work camp in Georgia. Del has a working knowledge of the trade, his parents having once worked in a similar camp when he was a child. However, before Swallow Hill, he was employed on a farm where his promiscuous misadventures with the wives of his boss and coworkers got him into trouble. Rae Lynn ,recently widowed under tragic circumstances, once ran a small-scale turpentine farm with her late husband . In an attempt to escape her previous life she on the run and ends up at the Swallow Hill camp.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ It has been over six months since Sophie Portman lost her husband Jack. Jack a, a geologist by profession, had been selected for a project near the Arctic Circle, and from what we gather from her conversation with her psychiatrist Dr. Thacker disappeared during the expedition. Sophie, a teacher by profession, is yet to resume her work and spends most of her time at home. In addition to her difficulty in coping with the loss of her husband, she also has a feeling that she is being watched and assumes that someone is following her and tracking her every move, even when she is at home. In her initial sessions with Dr. Thacker, she finds it hard to talk about her marriage and her husband but gradually she opens up, giving us insight into her personal life. 

My Rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐ In The Diary of a Bookseller, author Shaun Bythell shares a year in his life as a bookseller through a series of journal entries written between 2014-15. Since 2001, Shaun Bythell owns and operates 'The Bookshop' in Wigtown , the Book Town of Galloway. His store is the largest second-hand bookstore in Scotland.

My Rating: 4.5⭐ Look Closer by David Ellis revolves around Simon Dobias and Vicky Lanier Dobias, a married couple who have been together for almost ten years - the husband, an associate professor in law aspiring for a tenured position and his wife who works with victims of domestic abuse- respectable people, comfortably well-to-do and about to come into a lot more money from a trust fund after their 10th anniversary. Their marriage might not be perfect- a fact that they both acknowledge but they seem to be okay with the status quo. Or are they? When Lauren Betancourt, a wealthy woman with links to Simon is found hanging in her home you begin to question whether Simon is truly the respectable law professor he appears to be or if he is hiding a more diabolical side to him. Is Vicky aware of her husband’s true nature? Everything is not as it seems – both Simon and Vicky have secrets – the kind that they would do anything to protect.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Marcie Malone married her high school boyfriend Will at the age of eighteen when an unplanned pregnancy derailed her plans for travel and college. Sadly, she suffered a miscarriage but her marriage to Will survived and they built a life together in Georgia. Unfortunately at the age of forty –three she suffers a second miscarriage that leaves her devastated and depressed. Needing a distraction from her overall discontent with her life, work and marriage, she deliberately changes course from a work engagement and drives to Palmetto Key, Florida where a combination of her stress and pain medication causes her to lose consciousness on the beach only to be discovered by a local resident – the "prickly” and “hostile” Herman Flint who has lived in the area for over seventy years and devotes his time clearing the litter from the beachfront and keeping an eye on the sea turtles and their eggs.

My Rating:  4.5⭐ “Once upon a time, I dreamed of being unbound. I wanted to be free but couldn’t manage it. My brother could. My mother could not. My father could. My grandmothers could not.” In 2013 forty-one-year-old Sara Tarek Al-Ameed, a professor of Philosophy at Kuwait University is accused of blasphemy and arrested. A female student had recorded one of her lectures on Nietzsche and reported her - a part of said lecture perceived as offensive and blasphemous. A recent amendment to existing law has branded blasphemy a capital crime that is punishable by execution.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ In 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks, well-known author Cameron Young is found dead in his home in the Catskill Mountains, and all evidence point to his being murdered by his mistress, Victoria Ford. However, before the case could be tried in court, 9/11 happened and Victoria was one of the many who were inside the Twin Towers on the day of the attacks when the buildings went down. The Cameron Young murder case was abandoned but never formally closed.

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Thirty–five–year–old Carla Karolak runs a successful writing retreat, “Inspiration Point”, renting out “cells’” to aspiring writers so that they may work in solitude for a fixed number of hours per week. She is also a writer but has been suffering from writer's block for a long time for which she seeks help from Toonie Garabedian, her therapist who also rents a writer space (she is also working on a book) in exchange for her sessions with Carla. Carla finds Toonie murdered in her writing cell and the ensuing police investigation is complicated further when she gets to know of a string of murders in the area. 

My Rating:  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “What it was like to leave Earth: A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I still believed that my mother had some influence over the Universe. I’d been brought up to believe it, and it’s hard to shake such ingrained mental patterns.” Our fifteen-year-old unnamed narrator is being raised by a single mother in Toronto. Growing up she has heard the whispers, seen her mother’s herb garden and the bottles of “goop” her mother doles out to the women who visit her house for "consultations". She has also been on the receiving end of some pretty strange advice from her mother- mostly unwarranted, often intrusive and some downright weird. Why does her mother behave the way she does?

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Humans are forever picking their heroes and villains in waves of reversing fashion. Though at times—and this has happened not only with some pit bulls but with all manner of people and entire countries—we name our villains and then treat them in such a way that they prove us prophets.”

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Three-year-old Harry Monroe was taken from his home by someone dressed as a clown as the recording from the baby monitor reveals. His disappearance shocks the small town of Tall Oaks. Jess, Harry’s mother frantically searches for her child and follows up with the police for information on the investigation by day while driven to self-destructive behavior with a series of one-night stands and drunken episodes by night. Jess is separated from her husband Michael who has never shown much interest in his child and has indulged in a string of extramarital affairs throughout his marriage to Jess.