The Overbooked Bibliophile

My Rating: 3.5⭐ In Rock Harbor, Maine, “The Strip” on Hemlock Lane is a shady part of town that people tend to avoid after 10.00 p.m. (dubbed "the vanishing hour” by the locals) that earned its reputation partly on account of separate instances of the disappearance of several people who were last seen that vicinity. The recent disappearance is that of nineteen-year-old, Brooke Everett whose mother Kira is frantically searching for her missing daughter. Another recent disappearance is that of long-time resident, Martin Coleman, whose friend, an affluent businessman who was also reported missing, was recently discovered to have been murdered. The narrative is presented to us from three perspectives – Grace Holloway (third person limited PoV), a kidnapping survivor who is haunted by the traumatic events that occurred eight years ago and leads an otherwise reclusive life save for managing the local inn where Aden rents a room for the duration of his stay, Brooke’s mother Kira Everett ...

  My Rating:  4.5⭐️(rounded up) “Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring.” In an effort to flee post-war –Vietnam in search of a new life, a family decides to flee to the United States, where they have family waiting for them. Sixteen-year-old Anh, ten-year-old Thanh and Minh thirteen at the time, are the first to embark on this perilous journey, with their parents and remaining siblings to follow. In a tragic turn of events, their parents and younger siblings do not survive the first leg of the journey. Anh and her brothers are rejected for asylum in the United States and eventually are admitted into the United Kingdom – a journey that takes two years and stretches at refugee camps in Hong Kong and finally in the UK, where they await resettlement. We go on to follow Anh, now responsible for her younger brothers as she and her siblings process their losses, cope with the trauma they have witnessed and endured and strive to adjust to life in their adopted coun...

My Rating:  3.5 ⭐ Our protagonist, thirty-five-year-old Penny Rush, has a lot on her plate. Her marriage recently fell apart and she is currently unemployed and strapped for cash, but she doesn’t have the time to brood over all of this, given that she has to attend to an issue concerning her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, whose living situation has fallen under the radar of Adult Protective Services. Penny is on her way to her grandmother's house in Santa Barbara, to get it cleaned (Pincer hoards more than rats and jars of weird specimens on her property and won’t make it easy for Penny), with help of her grandmother’s accountant, Burt Lampey with whom she strikes up an easy friendship. But things do not go as planned and what follows is a sequence of (mis)adventures that has Penny jumping from one crisis to another. We follow her as she deals with the situation with her grandmother, finds herself responsible for Burt’s adorable Pomeranian, Kweecoats (a mispronounced version of “Quixote...

My Rating:  4.5⭐️ “People who grow up in old houses come to understand that buildings have characters. That they have memories and secrets to tell. One must merely learn to listen, and then to comprehend, as with any language.” Jess Turner-Bridges, a forty-year-old journalist, is called back to Sydney, Australia, from her current home in London when her grandmother Nora is hospitalized after a fall. Nora’s accident occurred while she was searching for something in the attic of her home, Darling House. Nora had raised Jess after Polly, Nora's daughter and Jess’s mother, left for Brisbane when Jess was only ten years old. Jess and Polly have remained in touch, but they are not close. As her grandmother floats in and out of consciousness, she utters a few disjointed phrases that initially do not make much sense to Jess. Jess learns that her grandmother had been agitated over the last few days. As Jess tries to find out what caused her grandmother’s recent distress, a significant child...

My Rating: 3.5⭐ “This is not an animal farm but Jidada with a -da and another -da!” NoViolet Bulawayo ’s  Glory  is an allegorical novel set in a fictional African country, Jidada, with an animal population throughout - anthropomorphic horses, dogs, pigs, goats, and chickens and others – comprising the ruling class, military, ministers and the commoners. Inspired by the 2017 coup that led to the removal of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president of nearly four decades from power, the story begins with the long-serving President, Father of the Nation, Old Horse, hailed for liberating Jidada from its colonizers decades ago, being removed from power by a carefully orchestrated coup. The removal of their leader was a cause for celebration, but when the Old Horse’s former Vice President, Tuvius “Tuvy” Delight Shasha ( a character based on Mugabe’s successor Emmerson Mnangagwa) quickly assumes the position of power - The Savior –with his own set of sycophants and yes-men at his beck and...