Reviews

Rules of Civility is the highly acclaimed debut novel by New Yorker Amor Towles.  The cover of the August issue of Oprah magazine referred to this book as “the one we couldn’t put down.”  The first portion does take off with gusto, but loses steam (or

“Luce’s new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.” Thus begins this novel, which takes place in rural North Carolina in the early 1960s. The central character, Luce, inherits her murdered sister’s deeply disturbed children. This changes Luce’s isolated and independent living arrangement in both fearful and hopeful ways.

Chip Linton’s life and the lives of his wife and twin daughters changed forever when – through no fault of his own - the plane he was piloting crashed into Lake Champlain.   Thirty-nine on board lost their lives.  The Linton’s relocated to a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire.  Chip, suffering from depression and PTSD, retired fro

Pirates, political intrigue, gold, tropical islands …and hidden histories!  I love it!  Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a grand topic.  And instead of being based on just lively imagination, there’s actually some real information an

In an attempt to broaden my reading horizons I set out to read international fiction, a genre I’m not familiar with.

It all started so innocently with a morning shave of a trademark moustache – but, nobody noticed. Nobody.  Neither the wife, nor the boss. All tried to convince him that he never even had a moustache ever before.

In The Complete Talking Heads, British playwright Alan Bennett has written twelve monologues about ordinary people dealing with personal crisis. First produced for BBC television in 1987, they were broadcast on American public television as part of its Masterpiece Theatre program.

Comic book writer Evie Walker arrives back in her home town to find her father terminally ill and ready to pass on to her the “storeroom”.  Evie finds out that apparently she is descended from a long line of guardians of the “storeroom” whose job is to keep the contents of the storeroom from falling into evil hands.  Little does she know that by guarding the s