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.