The Overbooked Bibliophile

  Rating: 4.5⭐ Having read and enjoyed the author’s previous works of WWII fiction,  A Song of Silence  and  To Dream Of Shadows , I was eager to read  Steve N. Lee ’s latest offering and I’m glad to say the author does not disappoint. Set in WWII Warsaw and inspired by true events,  The Ruins in Which We Bleed  follows thirteen-year-old Helena Sliwicka in the years following the Nazi invasion of Poland. Though the novel begins in 1943 Poland where we meet sixteen-year-old Helena, the narrative moves back and forth between 1939 and 1943 slowly shedding light on the events that impact the lives of Helena and those around her. The vividly described setting and the author’s meticulous attention to detail transport you to WWII Warsaw and life in the Ghetto with Helena and her family. The descriptions of the living conditions within the Ghetto, the hardships faced by those struggling to survive and the violence inflicted upon them by the Nazis, render this ...

Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ Off the Books  by  Soma Mei Sheng Frazier  is a compelling read and an impressive debut. Twenty-four-year-old Mĕi L. Brown dropped out of Dartmouth after a family tragedy and has been working as a private chauffeur offering her services “going karura”  or “off the books” on the advice of her eighty-six-year-old Lǎoyé (grandfather) - an American history buff- who helps her find clients and who is her biggest ally, as she has distanced herself from her friends and is currently not speaking to her mother. Mei’s most recent client is the mysterious Henry Lee who is paying her handsomely for a trip from San Francisco to Syracuse. Henry’s insistence on timed stops and the enormous suitcase he guards diligently never letting it out of his sight strikes Mĕi as suspicious behavior and she turns to Lǎoyé for advice on how to proceed. His reassurance is enough for her to continue on her assignment and as the narrative progresses, she gradually befriends Henry a...

  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 ...

Rating:  4.25⭐️ “I am on a peninsula, or to be more precise, the southern half of a peninsula broken in two. But in my mind, I am the land itself. I watch the waves, and when the tides come near, I will them to retreat, retract into their uncontained bodies.” Daegu, South Korea, 2011: Forty-six-year-old Eunju is visited by Narae, a Korean American woman in her thirties, who has come to return an item of hers that was in the possession of her recently deceased father Sangchul. Narae also expresses her desire to know more about her father’s life in South Korea and how he came to be in possession of something that belonged to Eunju. The narrative follows Eunju as she shares her story with Narae detailing a traumatic history she shares with Sangchul from three decades ago when they were both teenagers and inmates at The Stone Home, a state-sanctioned reformatory center. Inspired by true events,  The Stone Home  by  Crystal Hana Kim  is an intense and incredibly movi...

Rating:  4.5⭐️ Set in 412 BC, in Syracuse, Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War,  Glorious Exploits  by  Ferdia Lennon  follows the exploits of two unemployed potters Lampo and Gelon in the aftermath of the Athenian invasion of Syracuse. As the vanquished Athenians lay imprisoned in one of the old quarries in the city, starved and kept in horrific living conditions and easy targets for those seeking revenge against the invaders, Gelon and Lampo devise a plan to direct a production of Euripides’s Medea with those captives who remember the lines from the plays. Gelon is motivated by his love for Greek plays and his fear that the defeat of the Athenians would ultimately result in their famous literary works being lost to time. Lampo, the loyal friend that he is, goes along with his friend’s plans, though he does not share his friend’s fascination for Greek tragedies. The Athenians who know the lines of the play are offered extra rations as an incentive to participate....

Rating:  3.5⭐ Until August   by  Gabriel García Márquez   (translated by  Anne McLean ) revolves around forty-six-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach and her annual visits (on the 16th of August) to the island where her mother is buried. Ana’s itinerary includes a visit to the cemetery where she places a bouquet of her mother’s favorite flowers and indulges in a one-night stand with a different man every year before she returns to her family – her musician husband of over two decades and her two adult children. One of her trysts ends in a humiliating gesture and she carries both the emotional and physical reminder of the same through the years. Every visit to the island and her experiences with the men she meets inspires her to reflect on her actions, her marriage and her family. In sparse prose we are given insight into her motivations, her internal conflict and her desire in a journey of self- explorations with a thought-provoking ending. A departure (in terms of them...

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “With my pencil I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” When James (“Jim”), an enslaved man, hears that he is to be sold to a man from New Orleans and separated from his family he runs away, intending to find a way to secure freedom for himself and his family. He is joined by young Huckleberry Finn, who is running from his abusive father. James is aware of Huck’s plight and is protective of him. The narrative is shared from James’s first-person PoV as he embarks on a life-altering journey. James   by   Percival Everett   has essentially been described as a reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In my humble opinion, Percival Everett’s masterpiece is much more than that. The first segment of this novel explores familiar territory from within the framework of the classic that inspired this novel, but presenting the story from James’s PoV adds much depth and perspective to the story many of us have enjoyed over the y...

Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ The gruesome murder of a local teen sends shockwaves across the close-knit community of Granite Harbor, a coastal town in Maine. The body of the teenager was discovered strung up for display in a local historic tourist attraction known as The Settlement. Former novelist turned Detective Alex Branwen is tasked to lead the investigation. The nature of the crime has also attracted the attention of the FBI who suspect that a serial killer is at large. Alex, whose teenage daughter was friends with the victim, must leave no stone unturned in trying to find out whether a criminal in is their midst even if it means ruffling more than a few feathers. A second murder , also a teenager, changes the direction of the investigation and Alex must race to find the killer before anyone else ends up dead. Granite Harbor   by  Peter Nichols   is a dark, gritty, immersive read. The narrative is shared from the perspectives of Alex and Isabel Dorr, a resident of Granite Harbor and...

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thirty-five-year-old lawyer Camille Taylor’s life is upended after the sudden passing of her husband, Ben. In the months that followed, coping with this tragic loss proved harder than she could have imagined. Unable to concentrate on her work and struggling to maintain a work-home balance as a single mother, she is forced to go on leave from her job. When a panic attack lands her in the hospital, she decides to visit her parents in her hometown in the coastal town of Fairhope, Alabama with her six-year-old daughter Willa over the summer for a change in scenario and some much-needed emotional support. Camille had left her hometown at the age of eighteen, leaving her small-town life behind, eventually pursuing her dream to be a lawyer and settling down in Washington DC. As Camille and Willa explore Camille’s hometown, Camille is drawn back into the familiarity of the sights and smells and the warm embrace of her family. When she finds out that her father Sam, owner of a land...

Rating:  4.5⭐️ “There were seven of us in all, trapped on the island. One of us was a murderer.” When former Hollywood movie star Lana Farrar invites her friends to join her on Aura, the idyllic small Greek island gifted to her by her late first husband, for an Easter weekend getaway with her family, little does she know that one of the seven would not leave the island alive. Who was murdered and why? One of Lana’s guests, Elliot, a dramatist by profession, takes us through the events that transpired over that fateful weekend and that led to the murder in question. Through Elliot we get to know more about Lana and the others on the island - Kate, theater actor and Lana’s and Elliot’s friend; Leo, Lana’s seventeen-year-old son who wishes to pursue an acting career despite his mother’s disapproval; Lana’s second husband Jason who doesn’t seem too fond of the other guests; Lana’s housekeeper and confidante Agathi and the caretaker of island, Nikos both of whom have been in Lana’s empl...

Rating:  4.5⭐ “To be haunted by a memory and to be haunted by the feeling that you have lost all memory are nearly the same thing; it is all lost. You are never getting the real thing back.” Six months after losing his younger brother Kai to drowning, Damien, consumed with grief at losing the only family he had left, leaves his job as a cook in a restaurant on a journey with no destination in sight. His journey takes him across a grueling trek through the desert where he meets a Goatherd who directs him to a village, “a land for the grieving”, where he believes Damien will find what he is looking for. Damien lands up in the village, which is home to a struggling fishing community on the day of the funeral of one of its residents. Damien finds himself amid the deceased Carla’s family, her mother Ana-Maria, and Carla’s younger sisters Paola and Marta. Rumored to be “Bruja” whose fate is intertwined with that of the village and therefore influential, Ana Maria is an imposing presence....

Rating:  4.5⭐️ Revolving around themes of Native American history, heritage, identity, trauma and healing  A Council of Dolls  by  Mona Susan Power  tells the story of three generations of Native American women spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. The narrative is presented to us from the first-person perspectives of Sissy (Jesse), Lillian and Cora. Also sharing their perspectives are the three dolls that bear witness to the sorrows, loss and trauma these three women during their childhood years – their friends, companions, confidantes and source of strength in difficult times- Sissy’s doll Ethel, Lillian’s doll is a Shirley Temple doll she calls Mae and Cora’s is a buckskin doll named Winona. “We've had forces working to get rid of our culture and beliefs, our way of living, for many generations now.” Sissy’s mother Lillian is a strong woman, an activist with a volatile temperament whose childhood experiences, both in her family and in school, ha...

Publication Date : August 1, 2023 My Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Set in early 14th Century Europe,  Her Dangerous Journey Home  by  Lee Swanson  revolves around Christina Kohl, a Hanseatic merchant from Lubeck, Germany, who has acquired quite the reputation for her bravery and courage earning her Knighthood, not as Christina but as Frederick, her deceased brother whom she has been impersonating for the last two years. An important member of the Hansa merchant community in London, Christina’s truth is known by only a few trusted confidantes among who is the married young noblewoman with whom she falls in love– feelings that are reciprocated. Given Frederick’s courageous exploits in the past, the alderman, whose wife holds a personal grudge against Frederick (Christina), decides to send her on an expedition to the Baltic Sea to hunt down the pirates who threaten maritime trade on that route. We follow Christina as she navigates the demands of merchant trade, enemies with persona...

               My Rating : 4.5⭐ ( Book); 5⭐( Audiobook) “You won’t believe what women can do. These women- their mistake was in thinking they burned with their own unique rage. Something deeper, darker than what the rest of us feel. Let me tell you- inside we all rage the same. It’s how we let it out that differs.”  Diana Diosmary “Dios” Sandoval and Florence “Florida” Baum are inmates in a women’s correctional facility in Arizona.  As the pandemic rages on, both of their sentences are commuted and they are released on parole. Florida and Dios have a history – something that ties them to a violent event in the prison and Dios has knowledge of secrets about Florida’s arrest and her actual role in the crime that landed her in prison – secrets that Florida is desperate to protect. Dios holds this knowledge over Florida’s head and is fixated on proving that Florida, who comes from an affluent background and hopes to leave her time...

My Rating:3.5⭐ Set in an alternate version of Edwardian England, the plot of author E.B. Roshan’s novella revolves around sisters Opal and Gem Morris. Daughters of an eminent botanist, who has since passed on, they are immensely proud of their conservatory, which houses rare specimens and an enviable collection of orchids. Opal is dedicated to the care of the conservatory and takes pains to see it is not neglected. Gem is a free spirit and is more social. When Opal hears of a fresh batch of rare orchids collected by Leonidas ”Ned” Ardmore from Assam, India she is eager to purchase a few samples, which she does even though Ned’s uncle Sir Richard, who financed the trip and expects first dibs on the same, is annoyed which leads to a confrontation between him and his nephew. Complicating matters further is that Gem is romantically involved with Ned’s younger brother and is unhappy with the friction between the two families. In a shocking turn of events, The Morris Conservatory is broken i...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ Inspired by true events,  To Dream of Shadows  by  Steve N Lee  is a heart-wrenching yet powerful novel. We meet eighteen-year-old Inge Zaleska, packed into a cattle car with her family and other Jews on their way to being “resettled”. On reaching their destination, she is separated from her family and sent to a Nazi labor camp in Estonia. Alone, she has to learn to fend for herself and endure the filth, starvation, back-breaking work and horrific living conditions not to mention the cruelty of the SS Officers and the kapos in charge of the barracks. In a turn of events, she is eventually transferred to a different camp where she meets Nazi Commandant, SS Oberscharfuhrer Heinz Rudolf “Rudi”, Krusewho has only recently assumed charge of the camp. Rudi is portrayed as a compassionate character and as he observes the Jews in captivity and bears witness to the cruelty meted out to them by his fellow SS officers, he begins to question the beliefs that have ...