The Overbooked Bibliophile

My Rating: 3.5⭐ Over a year ago, a Christmas shopping trip to Pike Place Market in Seattle ends in a nightmare for Marin Machado when her four-year-old son Sebastian disappears without a trace. Video footage indicates Sebastian was taken by someone dressed as Santa Claus but without any other leads/probable suspects the police have been unsuccessful in their search for the little boy. Marin blames herself for letting go of her son’s hand to attend to a call from former college boyfriend/ current close friend Sal. Marin and her husband Derek are a power couple- both successful and wealthy, but losing their son fractures their marriage with Marin falling into depression and seeking help from a therapist and a support group after a failed suicide attempt, while Derek deals with his grief differently. Unbeknownst to Derek, Marin has hired a private investigator to help find out what happened to Sebastian. It comes as a sad shock to Marin when her investigator informs her that her husband i...

  My Rating: 4.5⭐ “Everybody knows that the war makes you simultaneously less than yourself and more than yourself. Everybody knows that during the war you can hear steps from kilometres away, but nobody told me that they will stay with me years later or what to do with all these people living inside my eyes.” It has been twenty years since our unnamed narrator was a child in Sarajevo caught amid the Siege of Sarajevo (that continued from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 for 1,425 days) in which 13,952 (maybe more) people lost their lives, including 1,601 children - an eyewitness to the devastation and bloodshed and the loss of lives. Though she is in a city (Montreal, Canada) far away from where she spent her childhood, her memories are easily triggered. In a first-person stream of consciousness narrative, our narrator moves back and forth between past and present as she recounts memories of her childhood home, her parents and grandparents and her plans of traveling to the moon wi...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Sometimes we just need someone with a fresh perspective to hold up a mirror and show us who we really are—who we could become, if we put our minds to it,” In 1942, as WWII rages on, forty-six-year-old Cressida Westcott, a famous fashion designer based in London, loses her home and business in a bombing and is forced to return to her home in Aldhurst Village. Cressida, a rebel by nature, had left her home after losing her fiancé in WWI and her refusal to marry someone matching her family’s status created tensions at home. Venturing out alone, she managed to create a name for herself in the field of fashion design and has never looked back. Her nephew, Hugh and niece Violet are her only remaining family. Hugh appears to take after his aristocratic father and is overly conscious of their family status, serving in the War Office in London and disconnected from the people in his community back home. He is mostly indifferent toward his Aunt. Cressida, though initially relucta...

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐ (Reread: 4 August. 2022) Almost 25 years after 10-month-old Libby Jones (not her birth name) was rescued her family’s mansion where she was found by the police along with the dead bodies of her parents and another man, who from all appearances were in a cult and chose to end their lives in a suicide pact, she now stands to inherit the house at 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London, worth millions of pounds. Unaware of her true parentage and the mysterious events of the past that links her to this house until she receives a letter from the Lamb family solicitor who also tells her about the two teenagers, apparently her siblings, Henry and Lucy, who have been missing since that fateful night. Though they never came back when they came of age to claim their inheritance, they reenter Libby’s life when she turns twenty-five, to reunite with the “baby”. As the story progresses, we move back and forth between past and present as we find out the truth behind Libby’s past and the fami...

My Rating : ⭐⭐ ⭐ Mark Knowles’ “Jason” begins after the protagonist successfully retrieves the Golden Fleece from the island of Colchis, with help of Medea, daughter of Aeetes, King of Colchis. Jason and the Argonauts, with Medea joining them are in the process of fleeing from Colchis, on the Argo. The story chalks the return journey of Jason and the Argonauts from Colchis to Iolkos and details the different challenges and dangers the group has to face on their return journey- from turbulence on the Inhospitable Sea, hunger and starvation, and the dangers they face on the different islands they moor their ship on- unsure of whether it would be friend or foe they would confront. The novel ends with a fierce confrontation between Jason and his scheming uncle King Pelias in Iolkos when Jason returns to claim the throne.