The Overbooked Bibliophile

  Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐  The Connellys of County Down   by   Tracey Lange   is an incredibly moving novel that revolves around themes of family, loyalty, and sacrifice. At the center of the story is thirty-year-old Tara Connelly, who at the beginning of the story is being released after serving an eighteen-month sentence for drug trafficking. Tara is the youngest of three siblings, who lost their mother when they were young and were subsequently abandoned by their father, leaving their oldest sister oldest sister Geraldine then a teenager responsible for Tar and her brother Eddie. Eddie, the father of ten-year-old Connor, suffers from debilitating migraines - the aftereffect of a traumatic brain injury sustained as a child. Geraldine is prone to anxiety and set in her ways and is struggling with added responsibility given to her at her workplace, a fact she hides from her siblings. Tara, once an art teacher, is aware that her recent stint in prison will adversely impact her job prospects. She do

Rating:  4.5⭐ Twenty-seven-year-old Ava Harrison has spent most of her sheltered life tethered to her fear of new experiences on account of a health condition that restricted her activities throughout her childhood and early adulthood. Though she has been in remission for two years now, the fear of falling ill again keeps her from enjoying everything life has to offer. But when she receives a mysterious letter written by her deceased former boyfriend with a job listing in the coastal town of Driftwood Alabama, she decides to take a chance on herself and step out of her comfort zone. Ava can feel a change in herself the moment she arrives in Driftwood but is also curious about who sent her the letter and why? “Everything you’ve always wanted is only a job interview away.” Ava’s trip to Alabama brings her to Magpie’s, a coffee shop run by thirty-eight-year-old Maggie Brightwell who had briefly advertised for a caretaker for her father, sixty-eight-year-old Desmond ”Dez” Brightwell, whose

Rating:  4.5⭐️ Battered and bruised twenty-two-year-old Rowan McNamara is fleeing an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Ethan whose recent act of domestic violence resulted in Rowan’s hospitalization. Rowan is pressing charges this time and is on her way to her inherited family home in Oklahoma to distance herself from Ethan. Rowan is an orphan, having lost her parents when she was a child, who grew up in foster care. She has an older sister Celia with whom she is somewhat estranged. En route to her family home, Rowan spends some time in her old friend Laine’s home in the New England town of Ellisburg where she meets eleven-year-old Gabriel Emerson son of Laine’s neighbor Lee who keeps him locked in a basement. Gabriel is the victim of child abuse and hasn’t stepped out of his house in three years ever since the death of his mother in an accident for which Lee blames his son. Rowan decides to escape with Gabriel and manages to take him and run, after a particularly vicious episode

Rating:⭐⭐⭐ The Shadow Girls  by  Alice Blanchard  is the fourth novel in the author’s Natalie Lockhart series, a fact of which I was unaware when I downloaded this book. The novel begins with the discovery of the body of sixty-four-year-old Randolph Holmes in a warehouse where he is employed. Though his employer praises his work ethic the deceased’s female colleagues were wary of him. Detective Natalie Lockhart leaves the side of her comatose senior officer/friend, who was attacked by one of their colleagues who is now absconding, to attend to the case. Her investigation reveals a sinister side to the deceased and links to other crimes being investigated. The narrative follows Natalie as she investigates several cases which seem to be connected including one involving the disappearance of her best friend more than a decade ago while navigating her personal life and relationship issues. I loved the premise and the setting of a town known for its “witchy" history, covens and Wiccans

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Hearts, you see, are like beautiful, perfectly glazed earthenware cups at first, but over the years they get cracked and nicked. Hearts break once, twice, repeatedly, and each time you do your best to put them back together again, trying to live with the wounds, patching them up with hope and tears.” The Little Village of Book Lovers   by   Nina George   is a beautifully- penned novel that revolves around family, friendship, love and the transformative power of books.  As the story begins we meet orphaned infant Marie-Jeanne who finds a family with bric-a-brac dealer and deliveryman Francis Meurienne and his wife Elsa the Valley of Nyons in the 1960s, both of whom care for her deeply though Elsa isn’t too expressive of her emotions. As an infant Marie-Jeanne has a strange encounter with Love, that leaves her with a special gift – the ability to see how Love impacts the people around her, the “glow” that is evident in those touched by Love – a gift that initially confuses

Rating: 3.75⭐ “Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.” Katherine ‘Kala’ Lanann was 15 years years old when she disappeared in November 2003, leaving her friends Joe, Aoife, Helen, Mush, and Aiden and the whole town of Kinlough in shock. The once tight-knit group of friends eventually go their own ways, their friendship fractured in the aftermath of Kala’s disappearance. Fifteen years later Helen, Joe and Mush reunite in their hometown. Joe is a famous rockstar who is back in town due to personal reasons and Mush never left and helps run his mother's café. Helen is a freelance journalist who settled in Canada and is back in town to attend a wedding. Past events come back to haunt them when Kala’s remains are discovered in the woods by the lake, evidence confirming that Kala was murdered. Who kille

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Set in 1945 Poland and inspired by true events,  The Tale of One January  by  Albert Maltz  tells the story of six prisoners of Auschwitz who manage to escape the Death March and take shelter in an abandoned factory in a neighboring town. In January 1945, Claire, a Frenchwoman and Lini, a Dutch Jew manage to escape during the Death March from Auschwitz by hiding in a haystack during a halt in their journey. Four men from another death march also have the same idea and the six of them decide to stay together until the advancing Russian Army arrives. (They can hear the distant sounds of the Russian rocket guns slowly getting closer). The men were non –Jewish political prisoners -two of the men, Otto and Norbert were German; Jurek was Polish and Andrey was Russian. Claire, multilingual and having worked as a translator with the SS, helps them communicate with one another. The group of six manages to find shelter in an abandoned factory in a nearby village where they believe

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fifty-five-year-old Francine Thwaite has lived in the family home, Thwaite Manor in Cumbria, England for all of her life. The land her home was built on has been in her family for over five hundred years. Francine is a loner who rarely ventures outside her home and her social interactions are limited to her trips to the nearby town for necessities, visits from her late mother’s close friend and her interactions with lodgers who rent rooms in her home. Her younger and somewhat estranged sister, Madeleine has a life very different from Francine and lives in London. But Francine is content with her quiet life and is averse to modern technology (no phone or computer to be found on the premises), She spends her time tending her garden, reading about the history of the house and the family and in the company of the ghosts of the Manor among whom is a six or seven-year old girl she calls Bree her favorite since her childhood. Francine’s late mother was a believer in the healing a

Plot: 4⭐️ ; Audio Narration: 5⭐️ Set in the once thriving steelworks and coal mining small town of Locksburg in central Pennsylvania, population 5000, Small Town Sins by Ken Jaworowski follows the lives of three of its long-time residents as they try to navigate through a vicious cycle of financial struggles, personal demons, poor choices, and broken dreams. Nathan Stultz, a middle-aged factory worker and volunteer firefighter finds a bag with a substantial amount of cash during a rescue operation in a burning building. Nathan dreams of leaving Locksburg with his wife Paula, a nurse, and believes that the money he found would be the solution to all his problems not realizing that his actions could have far-reaching consequences. Callie is a kind-hearted nurse born with a cleft lip for which she has been on the receiving end of much unkindness all her life and suffers from low self-esteem. When she bonds with a terminally ill teenager under her care, she risks her reputation and her job

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Set in 1960s Italy, the plot of   The Woman in the Castello   by   Kelsey James   revolves around twenty-year-old aspiring actress and single mother Silvia Whitford who travels to Rome as part of the cast of a movie that is suddenly canceled leaving her without work and in need of a place to stay. Sylvia hasn’t had much success in her career having played only small parts in movies and was hoping to relocate to Italy with her terminally ill mother, who is Italian but moved to the United States after WWII, and her two-year-old daughter Lulu who traveled with Silvia. But the cancellation of the project puts a wrench in her plans. With no other options in sight, Silvia contacts her mother’s estranged sister, Gabriella Conti. Gabriella is a recluse who lives alone in a medieval castle, Castello del Lago, which is in a state of disrepair and is believed to be haunted by one of their ancestors. Gabriella and Silvia’s mother have not spoken for years and are unwilling to meet one

Rating:  4.5⭐️ “Reading was such a quiet activity, and the reader in their parlour or leaning against the trunk of a tree would never imagine all the hands their book had been through, all the folding and cutting and beating it had endured. They would never guess how noisy and smelly the life of that book had been before it was put in their hands.” Set in 1914 Oxford, England during the Great War, The Bookbinder by Pip Williams revolves around twin sisters twenty-one-year-old Peggy and Maude Jones who live on a narrowboat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press – jobs they have held ever since they were twelve years old. Though their job requires them “to bind books, not read them” their late mother, who passed away when they were seventeen and had been an employee of the bindery in her lifetimes instilled a love for reading and books in Peggy, who has sacrificed her dreams of attending Oxford's Somerville College in the interest of caring for her sister, who is a

Rating: 4.5⭐ “Segregation in civilian life was still very much the law of the land, but the wartime needs in all areas of the military forced the government to admit that they would need to make some exceptions in order to win the war.” In 1944, as WWII rages on, Judy Washington and her mother are struggling to make ends meet. Judy’s husband Hervert is off fighting the War, enlisting after the bombing of Pearl Harbor resulted in African American men being drafted into the Armed Services. However, correspondence and money from Herbert had been irregular, forcing Judy and her mother to join the Bronx Slave Market where Black women wait on street corners hoping to be employed for domestic services by White women in exchange for a pittance. With the men fighting the war, there was an opportunity for women to join the Woman’s Army Corps (WAC) and after the massive loss of lives in the D-Day Invasion, Allied soldiers from different branches including those handling the post were also called

Rating: 4.5⭐️ Having read and loved the author’s Eddie Flynn series, this is my first time reading any of his standalone novels (I’ve yet to read Twisted) and I loved it! Amanda and Wendy meet in a grief support group, bond over drinks and share their stories of loss with one another. Both have lost a loved one as a result of separate acts of heinous crime and believe that law enforcement has failed to bring the perpetrator(s) to justice. They devise a plan to help one another – “kill for me kill for you” - each with a foolproof alibi to keep themselves off the radar of investigators. Sounds familiar, right? Initially, though I was enjoying the plot, the well-fleshed-out characters and the incredible writing, I was prepared for a formulaic read. You’ll agree that a Patricia Highsmith-like plot (I loved the way the author weaves the same into the narrative) though enjoyable, isn’t quite unpredictable. I WAS WRONG! (I love when that happens!) I won’t say more because I do not want to giv

Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐  As the novel begins, we meet Dinora “Nora” Wojnaswki eighteen days away from becoming the oldest person in the world at 122 years and 165 days – a world record that her immediate family plans to celebrate with much pomp and show despite Nora’s unwillingness. Nora’s great-granddaughter Deborah “Debs” Levene (née Wojnawski) is the one tasked with making all the arrangements for the celebration to be attended with family coming in from all over the world – a mammoth task in itself without her family members making things even more difficult with their travel plans, food preferences, internal feuds and much more. Nora decides to leave the care home of her own volition and moves into the home of her caregiver Arifa Hashmi, a Syrian refugee who fled her war-torn homeland in the wake of devastating tragedy. Arifa lives with her sixteen-year-old son Naser, who misses his home and the people they have left behind. Nora is a Holocaust survivor from Lodz who refuses to talk about her

Average Rating: 3.6⭐ Zero Sum  by  Joyce Carol Oates  is a collection of twelve short stories that revolve around themes of obsession, loss, motherhood, mental health, and much more. Crisp writing, insightful observations on the human condition and an honest, almost brutal look into the darker side of human relationships and emotions make for an absorbing read. In the first story,  Zero-Sum  (3.5), we meet a graduate student whose desire to impress her professor triggers a downward spiral. In  Mr. Stickum  (4), a group of teenagers devises an elaborate plan to punish sexual predators in their town who prey on trafficked young girls. Lovesick  (4) revolves around a young woman who confides in her former lover about receiving threatening messages from an unknown person, triggering conflicting reactions within her confidante. In  Sparrow (3.75), a shocking family secret comes to light when a young woman discovers an old photograph while helping her elderly mother move into an assisted liv

Rating:  3.5⭐️ Seventy-one-year-old Loretta Plansky is living a content retired life in her condo in Florida. Financially secure as a result of a flourishing business venture with her deceased husband, she is active and alert and constantly fielding requests for money from her adult children Nina and Jack for their ambitious (and not too well-planned) business ventures. She also has to deal with the tantrums of her ninety-eight-year-old father who is a resident of an assisted living facility nearby. Late one night she receives a call from someone posing as her grandson Will, asking her for assistance after being arrested for a DUI which ultimately results in her being scammed and her (substantial) life savings being stolen. The FBI is alerted and from what information Mrs. Plansky manages to glean from them, those responsible for the crime might be working out of a small town in Romania. Mrs. Plansky is not one to sit quietly and she ends up traveling to Romania in search of the person

Rating:  4.5⭐ Set in the Salpêtrière, a women’s asylum in 1800s France, author Jennifer Cody Epstein combines fact and fiction to give us a heartbreaking story that revolves around the plight of women being treated for “hysteria” under the care of renowned neurologist Dr. Jean-Martine Charcot and his team of interns and in the expansive facility, a "small, mad city" that housed “three thousand women in various states of mental distress; two hundred children in its reformatory schools; six hundred doctors, surgeons, internes and externes, nurses, and various other assistants; and over a dozen on-site workshops making everything from copper tools to iron horseshoes to wooden clogs for its patients.” Dr. Charcot’s research into the treatment of hysteria is highly publicized, complete with his famous Friday lecture series wherein he presents the symptoms he treats with hypnosis in a live demonstration with his subject (patient) which is attended by the public. The author referenc