With her latest introspective novel, “Just a Regular Boy,” Catherine Ryan Hyde takes us on a journey that we’d never imagine taking ourselves — going with a survivalist and his five-year-old son into the wilds of northern Idaho to survive what he believes is a coming apocalypse. Remy’s father, Roy, plans to survive off the land, and he believes that he has everything they need to survive.
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Can the stories we tell ourselves have the power to save us? In “The Secret Book of Flora Lea,” author Patti Callahan Henry brings us a tale within a tale as we meet two sisters, bound by the fantasy world that the elder sister, Hazel, creates and shares with her much younger sister, Flora, during difficult times. Their father is killed the first week he starts training to fight in WWII, and the family is bereft from his loss. When their mother goes to work to do her part in the war effort, Hazel cares for Flora and tells her stories to keep her busy and happy. We especially see the sisters’ bond as they are evacuated from London and parted from their very loving mother, and sent to a small village on the River Thames near Oxford, where they are lucky enough to go live with a wonderful woman and her son.
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Forget the debutantes in this clever new historical romance series starting with “The Scandalous Ladies of London: The Countess,” by Sophie Jordan. This series isn’t about the teenage girls (because aren’t seventeen and eighteen-year old girls still pretty much children?), but rather about their mothers and other women who are not quite in their prime. While these “ladies of London” are not still in the early blush of youth, they are mature women who want to have romance and love in their lives.
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It’s not often that a sequel is written over four decades after the first book, but in “Where Are the Children Now?” that’s exactly what Alafair Burke has done with Mary Higgins Clark’s “Where Are the Children?” which was published in 1975. While some readers might want to reread the first book, it’s really not necessary as Burke does a masterful job cluing us in as to what transpired all those years before, while making the sharing of that backstory completely natural and a part of the story.
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Author Charlie N. Holmberg writes a lot of fantasy, and her latest novel, “Heir of Uncertain Magic” is the sequel to “Keeper of Enchanted Rooms,” the first book in the “Whimbrel House” series. Unfortunately, neither title gives even a hint of the delightful character of this magic-filled series about two fairly tortured souls in search of some stability and in desperate need of some love in their lives. We meet those two, Merritt Fernsby and Hulda Larkin, in the first book as Merritt inherits a magical house, and Hulda is sent to help him figure out how to control the magic of the house. It’s filled with action, danger, and some truly heart-wrenching moments.
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