The Overbooked Bibliophile

  Rating:⭐⭐⭐ The third installment in  Robert Thorogood ’s  The Marlow Murder Club  series, begins with the death of Geoffrey Lushington, the mayor of Marlow, during a town council planning meeting in which Suzie Harris was one of the attendees. She is quick to summon her friends, Judith Potts and Becks Starling to the crime scene. It quickly becomes evident that the mayor was poisoned and as local law enforcement embarks on their investigation, DI Tanika Malik, well aware that no amount of warning would deter them from pursuing the case, engages the Marlow Murder Club as “civilian advisors” which allows them to conduct their investigation in collaboration with local law enforcement. The narrative follows our amateur sleuths as they go about finding the killer. The suspect list is long and finding the culprit won’t be easy but our motivated ladies leave no stone turned as they delve into the lives of the deceased mayor who appeared to have been well-liked by those wh...

Rating:  4.5⭐️ I Hope This Finds You Well  by  Natalie Sue  is a heartwarming character-driven novel and a promising debut. In the eight years thirty-three-year-old Iranian Canadian Jolene Smith has been employed at Supershops Incorporated, she has kept mostly to herself, limiting her interactions with her coworkers to work-related matters. Her method of coping with the stress of her job as an administrative assistant and tensions with her coworkers involves adding a text note in her emails in invisible white font wherein she vents her true feelings. Unfortunately, a careless mistake on her end gets her into trouble, resulting in mandatory sensitivity training with the new HR gut, Cliff and restrictions on her internet activity and office email. However, an IT mix-up grants her access to her coworkers’ emails and DMs – information that affords her insight into the goings on in the office and what her coworkers think about her and one another. Though she initially dec...

Rating:  4.25⭐ Oye  by  Melissa Mogollon  is an incredibly moving and immensely enjoyable coming-of-age story told through the voice of a Florida Colombian-American teenager as she navigates hurricanes, dysfunctional family dynamics the imminent loss of a loved one and much more over her senior year in high school. Luciana has a lot on her plate. As if her senior year in high school and concerns over her own plans for the future isn’t stressful enough, her mother’s reaction to her coming out deters her from being open about her sexuality and when her seventy-five-year-old Abue Emilia is diagnosed with a terminal illness, she struggles to hold her family together. Initially a reluctant confidante to her Abue, who knows exactly which buttons to push to get her own way, Luciana gets know significant facts from her family history gaining a better understanding of the women in her family and the generational trauma that has been passed down to the present day and how that...

Rating:  3.75⭐️ The Best Life Book Club  by  Sheila Roberts  is a charming story that revolves around themes of friendship, community, the healing power of books and most importantly, starting over. As the story begins, newly divorced Karissa Newcomb moves into her new home in Gig Harbor, Washington, with her nine-year-old daughter. Karissa’s move from Seattle also involves a new job at a publishing house. Karissa is welcomed to the neighborhood by her kind neighbor, Alice, a widow in her late fifties and forty-year-old divorcee Margot, who is out of work after being laid off. Karissa finds herself enjoying their company and they eventually start a book club along with Alice’s cantankerous older sister Josie. Needless to say, with each of the members facing their own set of difficulties, their discussions about the books they read soon turn into heartfelt conversations about their own lives with each of them sharing their own troubles and wisdom, inspiring one anothe...

  Rating:  4.5⭐️ Long Island  by Colm Tóibín   continues with the story of Eilis Lacey, our protagonist from  Brooklyn . Set twenty years after the events of the first novel, Eilis, now in her forties, is the wife of Italian plumber Tony Fiorelli, whom we met in the first book. Parents to two teenagers, daughter Rossella and sixteen-year-old son Larry they have settled in Long Island in a cul-de-sac with Tony’s parents and two of her husband’s three brothers and their families as neighbors. Despite being a close-knit family and Eilis sharing a good relationship with everybody, she is conscious of how different she is from her close-knit extended family. The differences become more pronounced when Tony’s actions push their marriage into a downward spiral, and she feels his family isn’t supportive of her or her wishes. Eilis hasn’t been back to Ireland in twenty years, but feeling the need to distance herself from Tony and his family, decides to visit he...

Plot:4⭐ Audio Narration: 5⭐ It’s been five years since Ryan Richardson witnessed the kidnapping of his girlfriend Alison Lane in their hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas. Ryan was left injured, with a vague recollection of his attacker, who was never found, and Alison and her car disappeared without a trace. Initially a prime suspect in her disappearance, Ryan is eventually acquitted, but the unwanted media attention surrounding the case forces him to change his name. In the present day, he is a law student at Georgetown and while visiting Italy with a group of friends he is informed that Alison’s car was found submerged in Suncatcher Lake with the bodies of two men and Alison’s bag with a cryptic note. Ryan, able to decipher the note, embarks on his own quest to find out what happened to Ali. In Leavenworth, Kansas, Poppy McGee, who only recently joined as deputy sheriff after being discharged from the army, is pursuing the investigation into Ali’s disappearance. She has her hands full, ...

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fifty-year-old Jo Waterstone has been working at Bruebaker’s Books for over two decades. Suffice to say that Jo’s life revolves around her work. Bruebaker’s Books has been a fixture in the community for decades and Jo takes pride in her position managing the bookstore and is confident of her ability to help people find the right book for themselves. Managing the bookstore has its fair share of challenges, but Jo takes it all in her stride. When the news of the owner Mr. Bruebaker’s stroke and subsequent hospitalization reaches her, needless to say, she is distressed. Not only does she share a close friendship with Mr. Bruebaker, but her immediate boss informs her that Mr. Bruebaker’s daughters want to shut down operations and sell the store as soon as possible. Jo believes that Mr. Bruebaker would not agree to the sale, but his family isn’t allowing anyone to contact him. To save the store, Jo devises a plan to barricade herself within the premises, keeping the doors close...

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Set in the 1950s,   Brooklyn   by   Colm Tóibín   follows Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant, as she adjusts to a new life in Brooklyn, New York. As the novel begins, we meet Eilis, a young woman in her twenties in Enniscorthy, Ireland, where she lives with her elder sister Rose and their mother. Her brother had emigrated to England in search of better work opportunities and Rose, a vibrant and ambitious young woman, is gainfully employed. However, opportunities are limited in her hometown and Eilis, despite training to be a bookkeeper, is only able to find a part-time position at a local grocery store. With the help of a local parish priest settled in New York, Rose arranges for Eilis to emigrate to Brooklyn, hoping to secure a better future for her sister. After a turbulent journey by sea, Eilis lands in Brooklyn, finds work in a department store and is set up in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Kehoe, a widowed Irishwoman. Eilis, in a new culture surr...

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 With an intriguing plot that combines elements of literary and historical fiction, courtroom drama and a touch of suspense thrown into the mix and its cast of interesting characters (old and new)  Camino Ghosts  by  John Grisham  is a compelling read. The third book in the author’s  Camino Island  series begins with author Mercer Mann's wedding with Thomas, with whom she has been in a relationship for over three years. In attendance are Mercer’s friends from the island, among whom is Bruce Cable, owner of Bay Books. Mercer is looking for inspiration for her third novel and Bruce suggests the story of the Dark Isle – a now uninhabited island between Florida and Georgia that was once home to a community of runaway slaves. The last living descendant of Dark Isle, Ms. Lovely Jackson, now in her eighties, lives on Camino Island after having left Dark Isle in 1955, when she was fifteen years old, with her mother. Lovely had self-published a boo...

Rating: 3.75 Told through alternating perspectives of several residents in a series of interconnected fragments,  Liquid, Fragile, Perishable   by   Carolyn Kuebler   is a quiet, slower-paced, character-driven novel that paints a compelling portrait of life in a small England town. The story begins in the summer that the Calper family moves to Glenville from New York. Willoughby “Will” Calper, set to attend college after the summer is over, falls in love with Honey Mitchell, the teenage daughter of a family of beekeepers. Honey is homeschooled, her family old-school, and their involvement, which they hide from their respective families, is only one of a series of events that send a ripple through the close-knit community. The narrative takes us into the hearts and minds of the residents over the course of year, not just Honey and Will and their families but also Honey’s friends, older and younger residents of the community, families that form the backbone of the comm...

Rating:⭐⭐⭐ Ambitious in scope, spanning the post-WWII years to the present day,  Last House  by  Jessica Shattuck  is a sweeping family saga that follows the fates and fortunes of the members of an American family. The story opens in 1953, where we meet WWII veteran thirty-year-old Nick Taylor, employed as a lawyer with American Oil, a part of a team visiting the Middle East along with a former Yale classmate Carter Weston, who “worked for the government” and whose area of expertise overlapped with Nick’s company’s agenda. With the growth of the oil industry in the United States, Nick’s career flourishes, affording his family financial security and material comforts including a vacation home in Vermont – a choice destination for many of his friends and colleagues. As the narrative progresses, we follow Nick, his wife Bet and his children Katherine and Harry - their hopes, aspirations, regrets and the consequences of the choices they make. “Last House” – their home is...

Rating:⭐⭐⭐ “’It is our history that sets us apart from other families,’ Da Ge said. ‘History that sets others apart from us.’” Their Divine Fires   by  Wendy Chen   is a multigenerational family saga that follows four generations of Chinese and Chinese American women as they navigate through personal loss and tragedy, social and political upheaval and much more. Spanning over a century, we follow our characters through a period of great political and social change in China – from the communist party and peasant revolts leading up to the Chinese Revolution, Japan’s invasion of China, the Cultural Revolution- to present day China and the United States. As the narrative progresses, we follow these characters and bear witness to their hardship, their strength and sacrifices and the consequences of the choices they make and the secrets they keep. The story begins in the southern China countryside in 1917 with ten-year-old Yunhong and is shared from the perspectives of the main...

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Recently accepted into a prestigious fellowship program in forensic pathology, twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Sloan Hastings is assigned the topic of forensic genealogy as her research project. To enhance her knowledge and gain a better understanding of the field, she submits her DNA to a genealogy website. She has always known she was adopted but little did she know that the results of her DNA analysis would result in a shocking revelation about her real identity – a revelation that connects her to the mysterious disappearance of three members of an influential family in Cedar Creek, Nevada in 1995 - a young couple and their two-month-old daughter, Charlotte. As Sloan embarks on a quest to find out more about the cold case, her biological family and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her adoption, she travels to Cedar Creek where she meets members of her biological family who are overwhelmed to be reunited with “Charlotte” after all these years. She finds an ally in the ...

Rating:  3.5⭐️ Unterzakhn  by  Leela Corman  is a moving story that revolves around themes of social class, inequality, generational trauma, social convention and morality, family sisterhood and survival. The narrative follows identical twins Esther and Fanya, daughters of Jewish immigrants, as they navigate their way through life – their childhood in the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side (circa 1910), the people they meet and the choices they make that lead them in different directions and how their paths cross over the years. The narrative also features a past timeline featuring their father and the events that led to his emigrating from his homeland. There is a lot about this novel that is praiseworthy – notably, the sense of time and place beautifully captured and presented through the author’s remarkable artwork and how the author addressed several social and feminist themes from the era (many of which remain relevant in the present day). However, what kee...

Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “ I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.” Twenty-two-year-old Violet Powell is released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a car crash that resulted in the death of the other driver. Violet, who was driving under the influence at the time, is consumed by guilt and finds it difficult to adjust to her new life in Portland - having lost her mother while serving her sentence and abandoned by her boyfriend, her remaining relatives distance themselves from her including her sister who sets her up in an apartment in Portland (away from her hometown of Abbott Falls, Maine) and tells her to stay away. While in prison, Violet was part of a book club hosted by retired English teacher Harriet Larson. “I miss how Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.” While searching for a book that...

  Rating:3.5⭐ “ The women asked: Who is safe? And Tamsen Nightingale said: The women who shelter in this red grove are safe. The women asked: How are they safe? And Tamsen Nightingale said: In this red grove, no woman can be harmed. No violence may come upon her. No injury to her flesh from the flesh of another. The women asked: Who is welcome? And Tamsen Nightingale said: Those who can walk in darkness are welcome and those who affix to the deeply woven roots are free. — The Story of the Sisters , Welcoming Incantation” Set in 1997,  The Red Grove  by  Tessa Fontaine  revolves around sixteen-year-old Luce Shelley who along with her mother Gloria, younger brother Roo and her aunt Gem, has spent the last eight year of her life as a part of the Red Grove, a secluded community in the redwood forests of California. Luce’s family moved to the Red Grove after an act of violence left her aunt in a vegetative state. The community, mostly comprised of women, offers a san...

  Rating: 4.5⭐ “The German people might want war. But this? This wasn’t war. This was something else. Something the civilized world had never seen.” A Song of Silence  by  Steve N. Lee  opens in a small town in Poland in the Fall of 1939 and revolves around Mirek Kozlowski, a Polish writer who also runs an orphanage with over ninety children under his care, a number that continues to increase as WWII rages on. Mirek’s prime concerns were providing for those in his care and keeping his children safe – a task that becomes increasingly difficult when the Nazis invade their small town, wreaking havoc in the lives of the residents. As the narrative progresses, we follow Mirek as he bears witness to atrocities committed by the SS. As the situation gradually worsens, Mirek struggles to a find way to protect his family while navigating the restrictions imposed upon the residents, censorship, food shortages and the surveillance of the SS headed by Hauptsturmführer Kruger who ...