This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. Fiona is 25 and close to finishing an MBA. She has a handsome boyfriend who works in finance. For now, she lives with her mother in her late grandmother’s old house in Pittsburgh. On the first floor they run the Enchanted Garden Café. The name comes from the lovely backyard, which features a fountain that her mother insists has magical properti ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. From Goodreads: Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. With them in the room is their previously unremar ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. Some excellent recent books have made wonderful use of the fairy tale/fantasy ingredient of opening doorways to other worlds. My favorites are Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. So I couldn’t resist picking up Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors. Getting ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. From Goodreads: Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country’s first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he’s dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father’s sins as a Communist informer ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. The Duong sisters have been cursed for generations: to not find love and to bear only daughters. And everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knows about their plight. They also know that the three 60-something sisters Mai, Minh and Khuyen haven’t spoken in a decade. Mai is divorced and worries about her own three daughters, all single but ver ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. Once was, once wasn’t. Marjan’s father has always started his stories with these words — stories of a girl who sprung a unicorn from a hunter’s snare, or a nomad boy who rescued a baby griffin. They were tales of extraordinary beasts that used to fill her with curiosity and wonder, but Marjan isn’t a little girl anymore. In the wake of her fath ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. Lucy is 26 and ready to skip to the good stuff in her life. The ceiling in her bedroom of her shared apartment leaks whenever her upstairs neighbor takes a bath. Dating is a string of disappointments. She works in TV production, but her dream of actually doing anything productive (rather than gopher work) seems distant. One night, when she’s re ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. One of the characters in What You Are Looking for Is in the Library described a community as “contacts between people,” further opining that this includes our past and our future. The librarian of a humble community library near Tokyo understands this concept clearly. She is instrumental in assisting patrons to establish connections outside the ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. From Goodreads: Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor forseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell he ..read more

This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings. From Goodreads: Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her 5-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes ..read more