Book Reviews

This story begins in a modest Canadian town where a favorite pastime is for families to gather and cheer on their favorite baseball teams. The hateful murmurings from abroad arrive and the community falters. Specifically, two families who have lived across the street from one another and the children have been close friends all their lives. Hate dictates that they question everything they’ve always known, and some make regretful choices with life changing consequences. The thing about opinions...they can change. Thankfully some were lucky enough to right their wrongs before it was too late.  In my opinion this book reads primarily as a love story. The historical fiction portion of it felt more like scenery — descriptions of time and place for a nice backdrop that will keep historical fiction readers interested. The soldier’s letters home, the battles, and the homecoming portrayals of the wounded soldiers were written in a very believable way as were the stories told (via main chara...

This is a great #fiction read that will help restore your faith in humanity. It’s about finding your way through the hardest of times & learning to re-open your heart and begin building a new future for yourself when the life you were living is unexpectedly, irreversibly changed. It’s sweet, caring, patience and understanding that helps those who mourn recover from their isolating sadness. No one wants to be told how to behave, how to mourn, or how to “get over it.”  Totally worth putting on the TBR. #Poignant new novel #TheLastGoodbye by #FionaLucas and #audiobook #narrated by #AntoniaBeamish (who delivers a wonderfully diverse and very believable cast of characters!!) is expected to be published June 8, 2021, just in time for #beach #reading #vacations. Thank you to #Netgalley, #HarperAudio, and Fiona Lucas for allowing me to review the audio of The Last Goodbye in exchange for my honest opinion. 

  This is an eye-opening piece of work. If you have absolutely no knowledge of the Lindbergh kidnapping, this story will leave you with your mouth agape. If you do have any sort of understanding of the murder trial and/or what type of man Charles Lindbergh was, you will come away from this book aware that many things happened in and around this case that were crooked and unjust and it appears Charles was well aware. It’s unfortunate that American thought of him as a hero. Shady cops & poor detective work is certainly nothing new but it remains incredibly shocking how easy it is to wrongly convict a man, sentence him to death,  and seemingly without any consciousness of wrongdoing. This book has left me feeling even more appreciative of the advances in science, forensics, and technology.  I feel pretty bad for Richard Hauptmann.  Sure, he made his errors in life but I seriously doubt anything he did warranted death by electrocution.  Thank you to #Netgalley, ...

This weeks’ library audiobook was pretty good and I highly recommend it. If you listen to audiobooks before bed, you might not get your full nights sleep when listening to this book. The setting is early 1900s when a huge earthquake happens in California & San Francisco burns for days. In short, it’s about a “mail-order bride” (Irish immigrant living in New York, her life is a shambles and she finds a newspaper ad placed by a wealthy widow in CA looking for a wife to be a mother to his 5-year-old daughter). Of course, everything is not as it seems and you’ve got yourself a page turner.  The Irish accent for our main character, Sophie, is wonderful and mesmerizing. Every few chapters there’s an interviewer (cop) speaking with Sophie in what I can only describe as a “Dragnet” style which I really enjoyed and helped to accentuate the time period of the story. Great audiobook narration! Sophie’s narrator: Alana Kerr Collins Cop Narrator:  Jason Culp