FAIR ROSALINE rating: 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. In FAIR ROSALINE by Natasha Solomons (Sourcebooks Landmark, September 12, 2023), a retelling of Shakespeare’s play THE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET, this ain’t Franco Zeffrelli’s Romeo, not that I liked him that much either. At least the 1968 movie Romeo looked the same age as Juliet. In fact, […]
CHENNEVILLE rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. After the Civil War, former Union soldier John Chenneville tracks his sister Lalie’s killer, a crooked deputy named Dodd, across hundreds of miles of battle-ravaged Indian territory and the U.S. frontier. His hard and painful journey takes him from Missouri to the Gulf Coast of Texas in CHENNEVILLE by Paulette
WHAT MY BONES KNOW rating: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. CW: child abuse. Got deep trauma? Feel like true healing is impossible? You need to read this stunning memoir, WHAT MY BONES KNOW, by radio producer and journalist Stephanie Foo (Ballantine/Penguin Random House, February 21, 2023). She explains how she ended up with complex PTSD (C-PTSD) and
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SYSTEM COLLAPSE rating: four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. This book is 7th in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. If you’ve never read any Murderbot books, this review has spoilers. If you’re up to date, I’ll try not to spoil SYSTEM COLLAPSE (Tor/Macmillan, November 14, 2023). This is the first book in the series I’ve read;
THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE rating: five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. The setting for THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride (Penguin Random House, August 8, 2023) is the outskirts of a Pennsylvania steel town in the 1930s—a place called Chicken Hill. It is home to a mix of Jewish, Black, and Italian households.
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BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST rating: 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. Audiobook will bump it to 5. This honest, big-hearted orc knows what’s good. Wherever Viv is planted, she blooms. BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST by Travis Baldree (Tor/Macmillan, November 7, 2023) is a prequel to LEGENDS & LATTES (Tor/Macmillan, November 8, 2022), which proved that the Tiktok kids are sometimes
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THORNHEDGE rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. THORNHEDGE by T. Kingfisher will be released August 15, 2023 by Tor/Macmillan. Some things are just “me” things and this sweet novella is totally one. A heartwarming flipped fairy tale that reminded me somehow of WICKED by Gregory Maguire (HarperCollins, 1995), but I like this storyline much better: A shape-shifting
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BLUE SKIES rating: 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. In BLUE SKIES, out today, May 16, 2023 (Liverlight/W.W. Norton), T.C. Boyle gives us the blackest satire of social media influencer culture you can imagine, set in a near-future climate dystopia. As you can tell from the cover, California is on fire. Florida has the opposite problem: it’s drowning.
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CLASS by Stephanie Land rating: 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. To read CLASS (Atria/Simon & Schuster, November 7, 2023), and Stephanie Land‘s prior book MAID, is to re-live the second-worst period of my life, from 2001 to 2009. The worst period was my first marriage, 1990 to 2001, but poverty and the family court system have a
THE ST. AMBROSE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS rating: 3 stars ⭐⭐⭐. (To be released by Gallery/Simon & Schuster, July 11, 2023). This could have been any one of three great, or at any rate very good, novels: 1. a psychological thriller, which gets progressively creepier and creepier, which is how the publisher is pitching it right
