Los Angeles has clearly done something to make the universe determined to wipe it off the face of the map. Or at least that part of the universe that has fantastical powers and a sociopathic, the world-done-me-wrong mindset, the drivers of action in Jackson’s Ford’s first two Frost Files books Continue Reading
Books
Hop onboard this #ChristmasInJuly as Mrs. Claus Takes the Reins
You have to feel that Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin would be mightily impressed with Mrs. Claus Takes the Reins, a book which goes all out to celebrate sisters doing it for themselves. Well, in this case, Mrs. Claus, who, when she discovers Santa still in bed right when he Continue Reading
What’s under the bed? Find out in Rosie Paints With Ghosts by Cassie Daley
SNAPSHOTWhen Rosie finds a secret door under her bed, it leads her to a spooky town with two BIG problems – they’ve lost all their color, and Rosie can’t seem to get back home! With the help of a new friend, Rosie has a new goal: repaint and restore the Continue Reading
Book review: The Rabbits by Sophie Overett
There are some books that are so beautifully, exquisitely well-written that you want to stop almost every sentence and exult in the sheer love and skilled use of language they represent. More, you feel an insistent need to type out every sentence you adore, and let’s be honest in books Continue Reading
Book review: The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry
While it’s not universally true, a great many novels about the multiverse come with a whimsical, wondrous edge, the idea that while there might be dangers aplenty in alternate realities, there is still an alluring sense of the different and the exciting. None of that exists in The 22 Murders Continue Reading
Book review: Love in Theory by Elodie Cheesman
The heart vs. the head. Not quite a battle as old as time but almost; throughout our relatively short evolutionary history, humanity has long debated whether it is better to let the heart rule ,with its passion and spontaneity, or to leave the head hold sway as it calmly invokes Continue Reading
Book review: Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott
There is something gloriously, wondrously good about having a space opera take you racing across the heavens in heady pursuit of power, fame, treasures or other eg-burnishing existential bauble. It is even better when said space opera is superbly written with tightly intricate plotting, well thought-out and realised characters and Continue Reading
#ChristmasInJuly Book review: The Cosy Christmas Chocolate Shop (Cosy Chocolate Shop #1) by Caroline Roberts
There appears to be a neverending streak of cosy Christmas noels out there. Many of them are delightfully written, giving us 300 or so pages in which to sink into a world, usually composed of a quirky but loving English village, a shop of some kind that usually serves comfort Continue Reading
Book review: The Long, Long Afternoon by Inga Vesper
It will be a news flash to precisely no one that people are very good at trying to create the reality they desire. It usually bears no resemblance to life as it actually is, and can be irritating at best and murderously destructive at worst, and in Inga Vesper’s The Continue Reading
Book review: Three Women and a Boat by Anne Youngson
People coming together in found families is something particularly new or original in literature of late, a theme that has found currency in our ironically disconnected digital age where finding your tribe has been a prevailing need for many lost souls in search of an emotional home. So, the fact Continue Reading