Category: Fiction

(by Robinne Lee) I have, yet again, finished last month’s romance book club read a little late—thanks to the movie adaptation of this one, I had to wait a while for my hold to come in at the library. The plot: a divorced mom takes her daughter (who is twelve when the book opens) and…

(by Anna Smaill) When I read The Chimes by Anna Smaill in 2017, it was a 5-star read for me, and while the details of the plot didn’t stick with me, I remembered loving Smaill’s writing. So when I saw Bird Life at the library I immediately grabbed it. The magical realism of this one…

(by Olivia Dade) I’d been a little curious about Olivia Dade’s writing since I read Jenny’s post on Reading the End about Spoiler Alert back in 2020, but I never got around to actually reading anything by her until now. I’ve never really been into fan fic (though I guess I did read a few…

(by Alan Garner) Treacle Walker is the first book by Alan Garner that I’ve read, but it’s unlikely to be my last. I’ve been meaning to read something by him for years, and was reminded of that fact when I saw the UK edition of this one at the excellent Shakespeare & Sons bookstore in…

(by Talia Hibbert) I’ve been meaning to read this one since it came out in 2019, so I’m glad it was the February pick for the romance book club I’m in. This one’s sweet but also steamy, and I liked it a bunch—aside from the third act conflict, which I found too stressful, even though…

(by Anya Johanna DeNiro) If you need a mythology refresher (which I did, before I started reading this): per Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Psyche was a) the goddess of the soul, b) Cupid’s wife and c) a great beauty who was transformed from being a mortal woman to being immortal after a series of trials. This all…

(by Kazushige Abe, translated by Kerim Yasar) Nipponia Nippon was a random library find for me: whenever I return or pick up a book, I also look at the “New books” shelves to see what catches my eye, and the first line of this Japanese novella (written in 2001, but only translated into English in…

The narrator of this book (whose gender is never specified) is blindsided by love, then blindsided by loss. We get glimpses of their past relationships—boyfriends, girlfriends, affairs with married women—but mostly we get the story of their relationship with Louise, which is a story of bliss followed by absence. “Why is the measure of love…

I’m sure I’d read A Christmas Carol before, but it was a long time ago—like, more than twenty years ago—so I figured the time was right for a re-read. I remembered the story, of course, having seen Mickey’s Christmas Carol and maybe also The Muppet Christmas Carol: Marley’s ghost, and the Ghost of Christmas Past,…

This is a pleasing little Covid-era novella. I hadn’t realized when I saw it at the library that this book was “the second in a series of stories” that Eggers is planning to eventually combine into a larger work, but that doesn’t really matter: it feels like a standalone thing, though now I’m curious to…