In “Walkin’ the Dog,” Chris Lynch tells the story of Louis, a boy who loves being home, has no friends, and will be going to the public high school after being home schooled. His father is a retired firefighter who bought a fishing boat and moved them to a seaside town. His mother is an activist whose mental health has been suffering, and she is in a facility working on regaining her equilibrium.
Continue reading
From the first page of “How to Solve Your Own Mystery,” I was hooked. Frances and her two best friends go to a fair in their small, picturesque town in the English countryside. An unusual fortune foretold at the fair by a “fortune teller” about Frances’s eventual murder changes the trajectory of young Frances’s life. She becomes obsessed with her fortune and determined to figure out who wants to murder her. This obsession lasts her whole life until, in her seventies, she is, in fact, murdered.
Continue reading
Sariah Wilson is known for writing light romances that often feature main characters with novel careers; in “Hypnotized by Love,” main character Savannah Sinclair is a hypnotist. There are those who don’t believe in hypnotism and think she’s a charlatan, but Savannah knows she helps people. A recent would-be client whom she rebuffed after getting strange vibes has filed a professional complaint against her, so Savannah is on notice to be extra careful and professional if she wants to retain her license.
Continue reading
Most of us who have dogs or cats know that animals play a lot; it’s a natural thing they do, and they do it with us, with other animals, or solely on their own. In “Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants reveal about Life Itself,” David Toomey explores how a multitude of animals play in nature, including, of course, dogs. This is not a light read, but rather a book that goes deep into the science of play, even the neuroscience and culture of play.
Continue reading
In this gripping novel, “The Berlin Letters,” set during the Cold War, author Katherine Reay presents two narratives and two timelines, as main character Luisa, a CIA code breaker, learns about a group of letters, referred to as the ‘Berlin letters.’ When she’s asked to help decode one, she realizes that it’s similar to a letter she saw her grandfather receive when she was a child. Her grandparents brought their daughter Alice and Luisa from Berlin to the US after the Berlin Wall went up. They won’t talk much about life in Germany, and Luisa knows that there are secrets they don’t share with her.
Continue reading
Biographic picture books serve multiple purposes; they not only teach children about special people, they can serve to inspire children by demonstrating the actions of others who may have overcome challenges, followed their passions, or shown a desire to change the world. In these picture books, children will learn about people who challenged traditions, people who fought to discover our history, and a woman who didn’t listen to what others thought women should do. We also learn about the people who saved an elephant in Vietnam and a man who wants to save the world.
Continue reading
The first book in the Whimbrel House series was so wonderful and complete, it might have seemed impossible that author Charlie N. Holmberg could create a sequel as compelling and gripping and touching as that first novel. Well, now we have the third novel in this fantasy series, “Boy of Chaotic Making,” and this story is just as lovely, filled with the same characters we have come to admire for their strengths and their failings, and with a plot that definitely keeps us guessing.
Continue reading
“Wrecker,” is pure Carl Hiaasen with its Key West setting and fabulous action, quirky characters, and clever plot. Carl Hiaasen is known for his novels about Florida, its struggle against pollution and destruction of the land and waters around it, as well as his tongue-in-cheek depiction of people who are oblivious to common sense and basic reasoning skills. This is a book that, in pointing out the racist past of Florida, and Key West in particular, could very well be banned in Hiaasen’s home state of Florida: In this clever and gripping novel, one of the characters actually feels terrible about an ancestor who was a member of the Klu Klux Klan and participated in the lynching of a white man who had dared to enter into a common law marriage with the Black woman he loved.
Continue reading
What Kate Quinn and Janie Chang have accomplished in their new historical fiction, “The Phoenix Crown,” is phenomenal. They have combined fictional female characters and real people and real events to create a gripping story that revolves around the Great Earthquake of San Francisco in 1906. In fact, the first part of the story, Act 1, provides dates, days, hours, and minutes as chapter headings until the earthquake hits. The first chapter is set on April 4, 1906, thirteen days, fourteen hours, fifty-two minutes before the San Francisco earthquake, as Gemma Garland, an opera singer, arrives in San Francisco with her bird, Toscanini.
Continue reading
Dr. Ian Dunbar, author of “Barking Up the Right Tree,” isn’t just a veterinarian. In addition to his veterinary degree and a PhD in dog behavior, he was the first to create puppy training classes using positive reinforcement. Dunbar’s future as a dog behaviorist seemed ordained since childhood. He has been training animals since he was five years old on the family farm in England. Now, after decades in dog training and studying dog behavior, and a reputation as one of the foremost dog training experts in the world, he is sharing what he has learned and what research shows about training and understanding our dogs.
Continue reading
Sometimes coincidences can be astounding. Last night I read the children’s picture book “Growing Up Under a Red Flag: A Memoir of Surviving the Chinese Cultural Revolution” written by Ying Chang Compestine and illustrated by Xinmei Liu. It’s a powerful book about how civil liberties flew out the door when Mao Zedong took over China and unleashed his Red Guard to terrify civilians into submission. The text is informative, very accessible, and appropriately shocking.
Continue reading
In a true mystery style, “Last Seen in Havana” presents us with the story of a woman who had disappeared from Cuba decades prior to the present time. Her daughter, Mercedes, returns to Cuba to help her grandmother, the woman who raised her, and decides to investigate something that’s bothered her all her life: the disappearance of her mother. Author Teresa Dovalpage provides us with two narratives, Mercedes’ present-day account and her mother’s story, each chapter from her mother’s point of view beginning with part of a letter she had written to her best friend, Rob.
Continue reading