Jan 2020 Release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION It’s the summer of 1907 and the sun is scorching down on Mary Pearl in the Arizona Territory. Mary Pearl and her sister Esther take their minds off the heat by sneaking banned Jane Austen novels from Aunt Sarah Elliot’s lively bookshelf. Whispered read alouds preoccupy their nights, and reveries of getting… Read more »
Jan 2020 Release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION The year is 1911 when twenty-year-old heiress Peggy Batternberg is invited to spend the summer in America’s Playground. The invitation to Coney Island is unwelcome. Despite hailing from one of America’s richest families, Peggy would much rather spend the summer working at the Moonrise Bookstore than keeping up appearances with New York… Read more »
Jan 2020 Release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of… Read more »
Jan 2020 release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION The heiress . . . The Resistance fighter . . . The widow . . . Three women whose fates are joined by one splendid hotel France, 1914. As war breaks out, Aurelie becomes trapped on the wrong side of the front with her father, Comte Sigismund de Courcelles. When the Germans… Read more »
Jan 2020 Release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION Norway, 1940. Nazis pour into Oslo, a shroud of dread looms over the city, and eighteen-year-old Ingrid Solberg fears the worst. Under German rule, harsh rationing and the exorbitant cost of medicine threaten the lives of many, including Ingrid’s mother. And when Ingrid meets a young SS officer, she’s forced to make… Read more »
BOOK DESCRIPTION Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century: her son Winston. But Jennie—reared in the luxury of Gilded Age Newport and the Paris of the Second Empire—lived an outrageously modern life… Read more »
Oct 2019 Release – Amazon Link BOOK DESCRIPTION This poignant and heartbreaking novel explores the power of resilience, the gift of friendship, and the divine beauty to be found in the big, bright world—if only we’re willing to look. Pennsylvania, 1940s. The only life Brighton Friedrich has ever known is the one she has endured within the dreary walls of… Read more »
The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler is definitely the central book that comes to mind when assessing the books I’ve read this year! Back in January I was thrilled to find this novel was soon to be released as the main character is an intriguing local historical figure in the exact town where I started working as a museum director!… Read more »
Nov 2019 Release BOOK DESCRIPTION In the tradition of Jennifer Robson and Hazel Gaynor, this unforgettable debut novel is a sweeping tale of forbidden love, profound loss, and the startling truth of the broken families left behind in the wake of World War I. 1921. Survivors of the Great War are desperately trying to piece together the fragments of their… Read more »
It’s been a very hectic year with my new career, and I have not had the luxury of free time as I had in the past. But, I plan for 2020 to be different. I can’t lose sight of this part of me–the reader. It has been the pathway to my current endeavors, and I miss being continually immersed in… Read more »
I was sent this novel by a longtime Australian friend who became interested in the television show featuring actress Natalie Dormer. “Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. Set in 1900, it is about a group of female students at an Australian girls’ boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine’s… Read more »
It’s been a very busy year with my new career as a museum director, and I have allowed my hobby of reading and reviewing to fall by the wayside. Going from working a 9-to-5 (or rather 10-to-6) for years to having no set hours has taken its toll on my free time. One might think that would be the perfect… Read more »
