Category: Books & Reading

It can be rough if things don’t go the way they’ve always gone. In Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, Violet Baumgartner has always sent a holiday letter, she’s planning the perfect retirement party to share in her letter, and, well, nothing really goes as planned.  “Life is what happens between plans,” a…

I firmly believe that every item that we own tells a story. Perhaps, that’s why Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has caught on so much. We want to have greater connections to the things we own and hold on to only those things, which truly bring us…

Life can get so complicated in just a moment. In Sarah Pinborough’s Cross Her Heart, main character Lisa’s life is going along just fine when everything changes. Her daughter, Ava, is turning sixteen when the novel opens. We can tell that she loves her job, and her best friend, Marilyn. But…

Many individuals are both religious and attracted to the same gender or both genders. While a few believe that you cannot both have a love for God and a love for a member of the same gender, many believe that the two are completely compatible. After all, God doesn’t make…

Every once in a while, you get a debut novel that’s truly something special. That’s the case with Sarahlyn Bruck’s Designer You. In this novel, Pam Wheeler seems to have it all – until she suddenly doesn’t. The one thing this novel does well is remind you that everything can change…

Lots of people have complicated relationships with their mothers. In Karin Slaughter’s Pieces of Her, we meet a mother-daughter duo with a very complicated relationship. Andrea Oliver believes that she knows everything she could know about her mother Laura. The two are close, and Andrea has no reason to believe any differently. Laura…

Sometimes, in order to move forward, it’s important to look backward. Whenever I’m working on revamping aspects of my life, I tend to look back and see where I’ve been to remind myself of where I’m going and how far I’ve come. In Sofia Grant’s The Daisy Children, main character Katie…

“Lucinda lay awake beneath her bedcovers. The wind wailed at her window. Tree branches scraped against the glass like ragged fingernails. It was almost too scary to go into the woods. Almost. “Under her sheets, she shined her flashlight on the map of the woods she’d drawn with crayons in…

It’s always good when you find a book you can’t put down, and The Last Thing I Told You by Emily Arsenault is definitely a book you can’t put down. The novel follows the investigation being undertaken of Detective Henry Peacher. A therapist is dead after being bludgeoned in his office,…

In a time where around us, there’s a lot of racism and xenophobia, including from the nation’s leaders, reading a book about individuals viewing the United States through the eyes of someone born outside the country is even more important. Leah Franqui’s America for Beginners takes readers on a journey with…