In the holiday spirit of giving, you get not one, but two reviews. So get your coco ready and let’s dive into our festive reads! A Highland Christmas Deep in the Scottish highlands, the people of Lochdubh do not believe in the fanfare and commercialism of Christmas. Police Constable Macbeth is stuck on duty while his…
Category: Fiction
The Rose Code
I’m a sucker for a historical novel, especially those set in World War II, so I might be biased in my preference for this topic, but between the intrigue of code breaking, the brutally honest depiction of relationships, and the intrigue of uncovering an informant, I couldn’t put The Rose Code down. Osla, Mab, and Beth…
Hallowe’en Party
It’s all fun and games until Joyce, a thirteen year-old who claims to have witnessed a murder, winds up dead at a children’s Halloween party. Brought in on request of his friend, Hercule Poirot (a recurring character in Christie’s writing) must dredge up old and forgotten incidents in the sleepy town of Woodleigh Common in order…
Hamnet
‘Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ – Steven Greenblatt Golden hair, wistful daydreams, and a name enduring generations, Hamnet details the life of a boy and his family: his twin Judith, a sister Susanna, his mother Agnes, and his father…
Don’t Look For Me
A mother drowning in guilt, a family torn apart by grief, and a stranded car in the wake of a New England hurricane set the stage for Walker’s suspenseful novel. Don’t Look For Me provides the perfect balance of mystery and suspense without being too graphic or terrifying. After a tragic accident tore her family apart, Molly Clarke…
Ready Player Two
First off, yes, the title is correct -this is the sequel to Ready Player One– and no, this will not include any spoilers for either of the novels. I read Ready Player One years ago and loved how Cline brought the culture of the 80s together with a modern-day underdog, technological fantasies, and a teenage love story. I got…
Where the Crawdads Sing
I would like to begin by acknowledging that I’m a few years late to the craze surrounding this book and my only excuse is my stubbornness about being a “band-wagoner”. Additionally, I had heard mixed, lackluster reviews from friends, which only cemented its position at the bottom of my TBR list. I’m thankful for my belated reading…
Conversations with Friends
“what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?” After 300+ pages with Rooney’s characters, I’m honestly not sure how to answer those questions. How do you evaluate friendship when your perception is biased by your interpretation of communication? Do conversations you have with yourself even count? These are core elements explored through the life of Frances,…
Shuggie Bain
I’ll be honest, my main interest in this book came when it won the 2020 Booker Prize and I was curious if it would live up to the hype. Suffice it to say, it did. In an oversimplification, this is a book about longing: longing to be accepted, longing for bigger and better, longing for normalcy, longing for…
If Cats Disappeared From the World
(Translated by Eric Selland) If you had to erase one thing from the world to live an extra day, what would it be? This is the reality of the novel’s narrator as he’s faced with the opportunity to live just a little bit longer. The narrator, who works as a postman and lives with his cat…