Category: Books

Genre: Book  

Grade:  A-

Notable People: Linda Castillo

Title: “Shamed”

Review:    The next to latest volume (new one just came out) in the long running series, featuring chief of Police, Kate Burkholder, set in Ohio’s Amish country. It’s another barn burner…just plain hard to put down. Her long running characters develop nicely over time, and her knowledge of police procedurals is impeccable…as well as her insight into the eccentricities of the Amish culture. Great sense of place and the story is quite believable while being just this side of fantastical. Really, really like these books. Start at the top with this series.   

Genre: Book    

Grade:  A-

Notable People: Jo Jo Noyes

Title: “The Giver of Stars”

Review:    This a well written, beautiful book set in the hollers of Kentucky during the Depression. It’s based on the true story of a group of woman who became the WPA sponsored Packhorse Librarians-delivering books and opportunities to learn to read to the back country people of the region. In the midst of that there is murder, moonshining, and a saga of how coal mining affected the area and its people. Wonderful character studies and a treatise on the power of unlikely friendships in a tough, grimy, hardscrabble environment. Hard to put down.

Genre: Book     

Grade:  A

Notable People: Heather Morris

Title:  “Cilka’s Journey”

Review:    The follow up book to Morris’s award winning concentration camp story, “The Taoists of Auschwitz. This book is hard to put down. Cilka was introduced in the first book and is based on a real person and real events that took a 16-year-old girl from the horrors of Auschwitz to the equally atrocious Russian Siberian Gulag work camps. A young woman who was painted a traitor after the war, who in actuality saved more lives than can be counted. A touching, horrific, and inspiring story of brutality, perseverance and rising above. A book not to be missed.

Genre: Book    

Grade:  A

Notable People: Anthony Doerr

Title:  All the Light We Cannot See”

Review:    Brilliantly written book about the experiences of a (too) young German soldier and a blind French girl during the second world war. Each very small chapter, alternating their unique story from the stat to the end of the war- and the to the present, ultimately centering around the tiny seaside city of St. Malo on the Brittany coast. Extraordinary look inside the minds and hearts of two young people caught up in something that makes no sense and which they have no control over. Tragic, illuminating, heartfelt, uplifting- all at the same time. I savored this book for many weeks.

Genre: Book     

Grade:  A-

Notable People: Jonathan Franzen

Title: Freedom

Review:    Franzen has won the National book award for his previous novel, so I was quite eager…but then the book was so very slow to start, I almost gave up. But stuck with it, and it turned out to be a fine read about a 30-year marriage between two iconoclasts. Sweeping story from St. Paul, to the coal mining hollers of West Virginia, to power environmentalists in DC, and a fading 70s rock star in Jersey City. The novel is dense, so read in short segments, which made the lengthy novel go a long way during the Pandemic. The characters really came to life for me as the book progressed. Franzen had a keen eye for detail, language and context…. ugly turns sweet in this book.

Genre: Book      

Grade:  B+

Notable People: Caleb Carr

Title: Surrender, New York

Review:    Not what it sounds like…. Surrender is a fictional town in the Albany region of upstate New York. Carr is new to me…not the greatest writer, but weaves quite the yarn about two crime profilers who have been exiled from NYC for being too honest in a shame run system and are hiding out at a historic farm in surrender. Two pretty interesting characters, a really convoluted plot, lots of old New York Tammany Hall politics, a rare leopard of some kind and a blind chanteuse…..ok….it has a lot of far out shit. Not going to knock your socks off, but provided me ten days (it’s long) of reading in the Time of Corona.

Genre: Book  

Grade:  A-

Notable People: John Hart

Title: Redemption Road

Review:    Quite the find. Hart is the only two-time winner of the Edgar Award for Best novel, and my daughter got me this one of his works for Christmas. This is humdinger of a story: serial killing, corrupt police and prison officials, God and lost souls. The protagonist character, a woman detective in North Carolina, Elizabeth Black confronts her troubled past along with a former detective imprisoned for a grisly murder for thirteen years. Wonderful characters, gripping writing, great sense of place. Thought it was about 100 pages to long (it’s a behemoth), but one of the best epilogues to a novel I have read. Good read for our troubled times…..very distracting..

Genre: Book

Grade:  A-

Notable People: Nevada Barr

Title: Destroyer Angel

Review:    After a long hiatus, returned to the iconic long running Anna Pidgeon series. Anna is a National Park Service ranger turned investigator, and the books take place all over the US Park system. This one is in remote northern Minnesota and on a girl getaway canoe trip that turns into anyone’s’ worst nightmare. The book defines evil and heroism. Anna and the dog, Wiley, are rescuers for the ages. This may be her best book ever, and kept me riveted for four days of nonstop reading.