The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand St. Martin’s Griffin, 336 pages Buy from Amazon >> The Blue Bistro may be the fourth of author Elin Hilderbrand’s novels set on the island of Nantucket, but it’s only the second I’ve read. Thankfully, her novels are not a series, as much as they are a collection. Most [...]

The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey Harper Perennial, 288 Pages Get it from Amazon >> When you’re on a road trip having a good book to read is just as important as having cheap auto insurance. I thought I’d packed decent reading material for our recent emergency trip to Iowa (my brother-in-law died of brain [...]

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein Harper, 321 pages Get it from Amazon >> I have such a backlog of books to review that there are likely to be endless days of me sitting up late writing little blurbs until the dark circles under my eyes are permanent. Well, I’ve always [...]

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay Get it from Amazon >> While there is no such thing as a term life insurance policy that repays you if you don’t like a book, it’s a pretty safe bet that if you see enough random strangers reading a novel you’re also considering, it probably doesn’t suck. That’s [...]

Norwegian Wood Harumi Murakami Get it from Amazon >> I’m about half-way through Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. I had the book on my wish list forever, and then finally bought after last summers writing conference, because so many people there were talking up Murakami. Honestly, I’m not impressed. I mean, I don’t hate the [...]

Lulu in Marrakech Diane Johnson Get it at Amazon >> I had just finished re-reading The Eight. which had some lovely scenes set in Tangier, and wanted something similarly exotic. I was standing in Barnes and Noble, talking to my friend Deb on the phone, and I saw the lovely red cover with Lulu in [...]

On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to: Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way [...]

Water for Elephants was recommended to me several years ago when it first came out, but for some reason it didn’t appeal to me at the time, or I passed it over for some other reason. A couple of weekends ago, we were at the library, and I noticed it. In fact, the library we [...]

Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah Get it from Amazon When you were a teenager did you ever feel like a ram of your head against the wall might be more productive than a conversation with your mother? If you are a parent, have you ever felt that way about your child? If so, this novel [...]

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld published by Random House published in 2005 ~~~In Prep I was expecting a posh boarding school story where the rich-bitch characters bragged about hotel deals in exotic foreign countries and wore designer clothes to class. Instead, I got the story of one Lee Fiora, a young girl from Indiana who decides [...]