I was super excited to read Lisa Kleypas’ new book (and opener of a new series of historical romances) Cold-Hearted Rake. After my last book, I needed something light, refreshing and easy like a romance. Though this wasn’t quite as awesome as some of Kleypas’ past hits, it definitely fit the bill. And it felt appropriate to kick off CBR8 with a romance, as I owe CBR for getting me into them. Cold-Hearted Rake is the story of Devon Ravenel (the aforementioned ‘rake’), who has […]
Suicidal Tendencies
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is two stories in one, or rather one story within another. Nao Yasutani, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Japan in the early 2000s, is writing a diary where she intends to tell the story of her 104-yr-old great grandmother Jiko and her life as a Buddhist nun. What she ends up writing about, however, is her terrible life as a recent transplant to Japan, where she endures bullying that would make and after-school special cry. She plans […]
Good Lord Bird
My book club is partially to blame for my slower reading progress this fall. All of our selections have been quite lengthy, and I am not the type of person who can read more than one book at a time. One of those lengthy selections was James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. This historical fiction novel tells the story of Henry Shackleford, a young slave in the Kansas Territory in the late 1850s who finds himself in the company of Old John Brown – more […]
Whodunnit? I forgot already.
It’s really hard to recall a book’s plot after you’ve read several others since, so forgive me for the brevity here. C.S. Harris’ When Gods Die is the second in the Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series. In the previous installment our hero Sebastian was accused of murdering a former lover in a most gruesome way. The second outing for Sebastian also involves the brutal murder of woman, this time in the Prince’s own bedchambers. Sebastian must assist the crown in proving its innocence, because the […]