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If you’re expecting something akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, you will be in for a disappointment. Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise is both hilarious and heart-wrenching. Narrator Deb has just gotten married to Chip, her positive, gregarious partner. They are on their honeymoon in the Caribbean when they become involved in a mermaid sighting, a questionable death, corporate greed, a kidnapping, and a myriad of other activities. The supporting cast of characters includes best friend Gina (“Everything’s performance art with her, she lives in a world of irony”), a hipster

Beg: a Radical New Way of Regarding Animals, with its sweet-faced dog peering at me from a soft, sage green background, imploring me to “regard him in a new way” didn’t prepare me for the most heavy-handed, condescending book I’ve ever experienced. Freedman doesn’t actually present “a radical new way of regarding animals” so much as beat readers over the head with how perfectly enlightened she’s become and then shame us into submitting to her will.

After about page 50, I had a hard time imagining who Freedman’s target audience could possibly be. Readers already involved in rescue won’t learn

Wow, what an amazing life Linda Ronstadt led! In a musical career that spanned almost half a century, she sang rock/pop, opera, American standards (accompanied by an orchestra), country, blues and Mexican rancheras (with a mariachi band)!  Along the way she performed, jammed, hung out and/or formed friendships with an eclectic group of famous musicians including Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, and Rosemary Clooney—to name just a few.

Simple Dreams is not a particularly well-written memoir, and it doesn't reveal much personal information (like the names and ages of her

Annie O’Sullivan is a realtor heading out to show a house one summer afternoon. Near the close of the open house, Annie is abducted by a potential client, a stranger who drugs and transports her to a remote mountain cabin on Vancouver Island where he repeatedly beats, rapes, and terrorizes her. As the days and nights of her captivity begin to blur together, Annie is forced to conform to the whims of a psychopath, "The Freak,” and to sacrifice parts of herself in an effort to survive. When she resurfaces a year later, it is as a shell of the person she used to be.

Annie’s story unravels in a

Amber Benson is mostly known as an actor, primarily for her role as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but she's also an accomplished author with a number of books and other projects under her belt. Her latest novel, The Witches of Echo Park, is the first in an urban fantasy series about...well, witches. In Los Angeles. Echo Park, to be specific. Basically, it does what it says on the tin.

Lyse is a young woman running a plant nursery in Georgia. She returns home to LA when she learns her great-aunt Eleanora has terminal cancer. It's there that Lyse slowly learns about the coven of

In a world inspired by ancient Rome, Laia is a Scholar, a member of a conquered people who were once the greatest minds on earth. Laia ekes out a living making jams with her grandmother, while her brother and grandfather provide health care to the needy. Until one night when her brother is accused of spying on the Martial Empire for a rebel group. Laia’s grandparents are murdered in front of her face and her brother is thrown in prison. Laia only escapes this fate buy running away. Ashamed of how she has behaved she tries to barter with the rebel group for her brother’s freedom. But they ask

It's baseball season! If you can't get to the ballpark, at least you can pick up this contemporary romance set in the world of baseball.

Alex Winters is the devil, at least according to Maggie Jameson. Maggie has spent her life dreaming and preparing for the day when she'll take over as the CEO of the New York Saints baseball team. Unbeknownst to Maggie, her father has decided to sell the team to Alex. Maggie grudgingly agrees to help Alex through the ownership transition and in the process, they fall in love.

The Devil in Denim is Melanie Scott's first book in the New York Saint's series. A

Tiny Cooper is a character in David Levithan's book Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He is flamboyant and emotional, and he spends that novel writing and then performing a musical of his life. Hold Me Closer is that musical, written in theater script format.

David Levithan is one of my favorite authors (Every Day is AMAZING!) I thoroughly enjoyed Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I liked Tiny Cooper in that story - a lot. I enjoyed his flamboyancy and his emotional honesty - "Here I am, love me please!!!" But I struggled with this book, perhaps because I am not a musical person. I could picture some of

Cheryl Glickman is a 40-something manager of Open Palm, a women’s self-defense studio that has morphed into a supplier of self-defense as exercise videos. Cheryl’s home life is turned upside-down when she, seemingly overnight, takes in as a housemate a 20-year-old daughter of her Open Palm bosses, Clee. Cheryl and Clee do not get along. In fact, their bouts of passive-aggressive violence, subterfuge and insults are nothing short of operatic. The relationship between Cheryl and Clee is typical fair for characters in a Miranda July story – that is to say, it’s at turns surprising, violent, sweet

In 1884, Arthur Conan Doyle published a fictionalized account of what happened to a mysteriously abandoned ship, the Mary Celeste. Following in his footsteps, Valerie Martin imagines what life may have been like for the family of Captain Briggs. Briggs, his wife and daughter, along with the entire crew disappeared from the Mary Celeste in 1872. She was found drifting, undamaged, but crewless.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Captain and crew is a minefield for creative writers and Martin has crafted a beautifully haunting tale. The story mostly revolves around Violet Petra, a

Sometimes you feel yourself spiraling downward, and you don't know what to do next. Or maybe next has involved seeking comfort all too frequently in your chocolate stash. I hear you. Recommended to me by a good friend, I picked up this book.

The Bounce Back Book: How to Thrive in the Face of Adversity, Setback, and Losses is packed with nuggets of uplifting, empowering, actionable wisdom. Salmansohn uses a conversational tone and plenty of humor to share her 75 tips for bouncing back from one (or a multitude – what she calls "The Vortex") of life's challenges: life and death, career pitfalls

Maisie Dobbs' first case as a private detective is not what she expected nor wanted. But in the spring of 1929 in her new London office her first client walks through her door and asks for her assistance with a love triangle. Maisie, who was born into a working class family, is aware of her status and sex and is trying to make her mark in the detective world and so takes on the case as professionally as she possibly can. She has an inherent intuition about people and situations as well as a skill for attention to detail which she honed through years of reading, attending university and finally

I loved this non-fiction book, written by one of my favorite fiction authors, Barbara Kingsolver.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle details one year in which the author's family ate only animals and produce which they had either raised/grown themselves, or which they could purchase from local sources. (Local was defined as anything within a 60 mile radius of their home in Virginia. So, for example, since citrus fruits are not grown within that radius, the family did without citrus for that year.)  I found the whole process which  they went through to be so interesting - deciding what they were going

While it certainly contains the titular activities, this book isn't nearly as sensationalistic as its title might imply. More than anything, Sex & Violence is a fantastically-voiced, layered character study. The description "layered" applies to narrator-protagonist Evan, the other characters in the book, and their relationships; and it applies to the meanings of, manifestations of, and connections between sex and violence that Evan gradually comes to grasp in unstated, embodied ways. This is a depiction of real people and life, complex and complicated and lived.



Evan moves through life

Often considered one of the best management strategy books of all time, The Art of War, by Tzu Sun, is as pertinent today as when it was compiled thousands of years ago. “Work smarter, not harder.” “The best battle is the one never fought.” “A boss says 'go.' A leader say’s 'let’s go.'” These sentiments are not new. The basis for each can be found in Tzu Sun’s writings. The Art of War applies to conflicts on all levels; from battlefields to board rooms. Sun stresses the virtues of patience, strategy and outthinking one’s opponents.

I picked The Art of War because it was short at 172 pages.  I

Bless This Food is a collection of graces from many traditions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc. I came across this title in my quest to find dinner prayers that were more resonant with my family than the standard one I had been taught as a child or the simpler ones that I had prayed with my own children when they were younger.  Adrian Butash begins by beautifully describing the intimate relationship that humans have with food and the God or gods who are the source of that food and explains why saying grace and giving thanks is a universal phenomenon.  Bless This Food is

Such great world building. Such excellent character development. Such a detailed, compelling story. Such a refreshing pleasure every moment I spent with it.



While the first Seraphina book largely focused on Seraphina's efforts to keep her half-dragon identity hidden, Shadow Scale is all about finding and revealing her world's half-dragons. Seraphina and those close to her believe the half-dragons share a mental/psychic bond that may be a useful military defense in the war that is headed their way--and she longs for the kinship she hopes to feel upon meeting them after a lifetime of

An instant best-seller when published in 1968, True Grit has also been made into film. Twice. These facts alone should recommend it, and I am here to back it up with a solid vote for a place on your nightstand.

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross follows her slain father to Ft Smith, Arkansas to settle his affairs. While her mother expects her home, Mattie has other ideas. She hires a one-eyed, grizzled old US Marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice.

Against Mattie’s wishes, Texas Ranger LeBoeuf joins Rooster Cogburn in the manhunt, and the two try to leave her

This volume completes Atwood's trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and continued in The Year of the Flood. In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a man-made global pandemic, known by God's Gardeners, a new environmental religious sect, as the waterless flood. But as the trilogy's main characters have discovered, there are more survivors than they originally imagined, and they're not all friendly and supportive. In this installment, the main characters of the previous two novels have converged together with other human survivors and the Crakers (the new human

A near extinction level event strikes the earth, humanity is devastated and left with just a handful of hardy survivors. How will a small group of survivors not just survive but how can they rebuild modern civilization from the ashes? Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge tries to answer this question and serve as a guidebook for restarting civilization.

The beginning of the book covers how, without routine human intervention, infrastructure quickly begins to rot. Survivors will need to scavenge and scrape to get by. Once able to survive Dartnell describes the processes of rebuilding agriculture

The title of this book attracted me first with its quirky how-to beginning and then an ending I wasn't sure what to make of. What's a science fictional universe, I wondered, and was hooked.

Arlin Buyert’s latest collection, Oh Say Can You See, opens with "Big Brother", a poem that exposes the aftermath of a spirit ravaged by war. It is a candid poem that ensnares the reader in raw emotion, a poem of spare words, grounding details and a haunting and unforgettable metaphor: “someone else came home:/quiet and brittle as a dead tree.” By the end of the poem, I felt as if Bobbie was my big brother.

Perhaps Buyert’s greatest poetical gift is his ability to always leave the door open to his memories. Somehow, as the poem is read, the reader becomes more than someone reading the poem –

20th anniversary editions of indie-pop albums stuffed with previously unheard tracks. Reunions of bands who swore they’d never again play together. Japanese retro-punk. Mass-produced faux-vintage t-shirts. Hollywood remakes. Nostalgia for a previous golden age of nostalgia.  

These are only the tip of the cultural icebergs author Simon Reynolds investigates in his eminently readable Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. It’s easy to overlook how much of today’s pop culture is based on ideas and interpretations about the (mostly recent) past. Reynolds argues that the 2000s  have

Comet, a rescued greyhound, will win you over with her lovable, graceful and insightful personality.  Steven Wolf rescues Comet from the horrors of greyhound racing, and in turn she rescues him when his debilitating back injuries leave him disabled and unable to participate in everyday life. 

Shortly after adopting Comet, Wolf stumbles upon the idea of training her to be a service dog.  Comet learns how to open doors, provide stability so that Wolf can hoist himself up, and even pulls Wolf’s wheelchair around the local airport.  While Comet is not your average working dog, she tackles every

Julie James is quickly becoming one of my favorite go-to romance authors. Why? She consistently creates smart characters who engage in witty dialog while falling in love. Love Irresistibly is the fourth book in the FBI/US Attorney series and, if you’re a fan of the series, you will enjoy catching up with some of the earlier couples. If you’ve never read a Julie James book, don’t worry. The books in the series don’t necessarily have to be read in order.

In Love Irresistibly we meet Cade Morgan and Brooke Parker, two professionals living and working in Chicago. Cade, an assistant U.S. Attorney

The Sacrifice, Joyce Carol Oates' new novel, is based largely on the 1987 Tawana Brawley alleged rape case and the author's 1969 novel, Them, based on the 1967 race riots.  The novel takes place in the fictional Red Rock neighborhood of inner-city Pascayne, New Jersey, in October of 1987.  It centers around a black family:  Sybilla Frye, 15, allegedly gang raped and beaten by white police officers; her mother, Ednetta Frye; and her stepfather, Anis Schutt.  At the center of the story are the manipulative Mudrick twins, Rev. Marus Mudrick and his attorney brother, Byron; and Leopaldo Quarrquan

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”  “Inconceivable.” “Have fun storming the castle.” “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” “Get used to disappointment.” “Mawidge. That bwessed awangement!” “You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you"..."You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die.”

The Princess Bride is one of the most widely quoted films of all times. The swashbuckling/fairy-tale/romance/adventure story is enjoyable for both young people and adults, suitable for the former

Obsession in Death is the 40th book in the In Death series by J. D. Robb, a.k.a Nora Roberts. When Naked in Death was first released in 1995, I bought it but I didn't read it. I also picked up the next four or five in the series, but I didn't read them either. I was, and still am, a huge Nora Roberts fan, but something about a futuristic mystery featuring a NYC detective just did not grab me. I don't know what finally made me pick up the books, but once I started reading them, I couldn't stop. 

Obsession in Death begins with Lieutenant Eve Dallas recovering from the Christmas holidays and her

I have read many pastiches of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but I think I enjoyed this one the most.  Sherlock Holmes has retired to the country where he keeps bees and takes on the occasional job. One day, while out on the moor, he stumbles across Mary Russell, and they somehow develop a friendship.  Holmes teaches her the art of detection and she becomes an apprentice of sorts. As their relationship develops, Holmes involves her in one of his cases, a kidnapping, and then strange things start to happen to Miss Russell! Mrs. Hudson and Doctor Watson are here in supporting roles.  

Th

Signy Valborn  was only seven when she climbed the New World Tree and Odin declared she would be one of his Valkyrie. Since then, the Child Valkyrie has grown to be a disappointment. She has failed to solve the riddle given to her by Odin, and thus has been isolated from the other Valkyrie for three years now. Then, Signy meets the mysterious and somewhat alluring Ned Unferth, a troll hunter who claims he has the answer to her riddle. Signy then embarks on a journey to seek out her destiny, even if it's not the one she anticipated.

Signy is a kick-butt, take-names heroine that is