Reviews

First in the new Watersong trilogy, Wake takes us to the quaint seaside tourist town of Capri where 16-year-old Gemma is the star of the high school swim team and has finally made the boy next door notice her.  This summer there are three new girls in town.  Tall, beautiful and supremel

A wakes up every day in a different body. Guest for a day, A tries to do no harm, walk through that person's life changing as little as possible. Until A meets Rhiannon. Waking up as Justin seems like any other day. Justin is kind of a slob, kind of a slacker, and not all that extraordinary. A thinks it will be just like any other day, making it to class, figuring where Justin sits at lunch, if he has an after-school job. Everything changes when A meets Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon. She is beautiful and different, and A is drawn to her.

Until recently, Occidental cultures felt superior to the Oriental cultures, but the west is now discovering inspiration in their centuries old wisdoms, art and architecture. Early travelers and missionaries wanted to impact the Occidental world, not to learn from it.   If you were to pick up this book to learn about the types of tea leaves, you may be disappointed.

I don't generally like reading negative reviews and I like writing them even less. But sometimes a book affects you so powerfully in all of the worst ways, you have to say something. This is how I feel about Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Burke strays from his usual mystery genre, but not from his geography.   This Civil War tale is in part a story of his ancestors, Robert Perry and Willie Burke, and is set in and around New Iberia, Louisiana.  Willie is one of the main narrators of the story whi

Some kids are identified by their parent's profession: the preacher's kid, the doctor's kid, the principal's kid, the mayor's kid. Jazz is defined by his father's profession: serial killer. Billy Dent is the most notorious super-serial, claiming 123 victims in his decades long spree. Worse than being the serial killer's kid was that every day was take-your-kid-to-work day for Billy. Jazz learned how to separate a hand from it's fingers, how to stalk a victim, and how to commit the perfect crime without getting caught.

For those familiar with Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles, the story opens with Maura preparing for a two-week vacation in rural Maine at Evensong, the school that Julian “Rat” Perkins has been attending since he and Maura survived a harrowing ordeal in Ice Cold.  Julian, now 16, loves the unique and isolated school where all of the students have survived some traged

Do you ever wonder what would happen if several teenage beauty contestants crashed on a seemingly deserted island? This book is about survival:  Can a bunch of pretty teenagers work together or will they die trying?  Then there are the countless others who are sure the teenagers won’t survive more than a couple of weeks.

Cypress

n.    1. Any of various evergreen trees or shrubs of the genus Cupressus, native to Eurasia and  North America and having opposite, scale-like leaves and globose woody cones. 

 2. Cypess branches used as a symbol of mourning.

I admit: The reason I first picked up a book by Ayelet Waldman is because I have a literary crush on her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Michael Chabon.  I wanted to get into the head of Waldman, to see what Chabon sees in her.  After having devoured all seven of her Mommy-Track Mystery series, I understand her appeal.