Latest Reviews
From the moment Aphrodite emerges fully formed from the sea, she is devastatingly beautiful and imbued with ancient power. When fate brings her face to face with Ares, she bristles at this surly, hot-tempered warrior who’s seemingly her opposite: disliked by everyone and devoted to stirring up conflict. Yet these gods are no more immune to the dizzying highs and lows of love and loss than anyone else. They are soon irresistibly drawn to one another. As their love affair spans mortal lifetimes, Aphrodite begins to question the gods’ games and her role in them. But there’s only so much room for fire and passion in Zeus’ kingdom. Before long, she must test her devotion to her own divine purpose --- and to a love that can only lead to ruin.
When 26-year-old Daisy wakes up next to James Stanley, she can’t believe what she’s done. But sleeping with him is a casualty of a Much Larger Problem --- there is not a decent, single man to be found in London. Fed up with the dating scene, Daisy and her best friend, Maya, decide to stop waiting and take matters into their own hands with “The Project.” Their goal? To build the perfect, eligible match out of some of the most lackluster, raw material. And who better to start with than their embarrassingly uncivilized (yet frustratingly attractive) friend, James? Embarking on a series of social and cultural lessons --- from art exhibitions to feminist book clubs, designer clothing stores to house parties --- Daisy and Maya chaperone James on a journey of discovery. But which of them will change more?
Mira Guhathakurta is a poetry editor at a distinguished literary magazine in New York, a dream job that has given her nearly everything she's always wanted. And then she reconnects with Jack from college, and suddenly she feels as if she might have found her soulmate. They've woven their lives together so thoroughly. All that remains is for Jack to meet her family: her beloved father and dear sister, Joy. But when Joy commits an unthinkable act of betrayal, the sisters are impossibly fractured and their father's heart is broken. As the sisters navigate their tumultuous relationship and Mira starts over, it turns out that Joy isn't the only one who has been --- or continues to be --- dishonest.
After years of close calls, O’Conner --- the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge” --- spends most of his time in semi-retirement, running his legitimate businesses and playing pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his middle-class neighborhood is the wiser to his double life. But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay dead. When he’s approached with a job he can’t resist, he agrees to mastermind his biggest heist yet: a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker, hidden beneath his newly constructed basketball arena. As the job goes down, testing O’Conner’s mettle with new challenges, the promise of the score attracts ghosts from his past he thought were long buried.
Isobel Anderssen has heard rumors. Nestled deep in the Swedish woods, there is a retreat. Primarily aimed at helping women who have gone through devastating break-ups, the Himlafall Clinic is meant to heal your mind and help you move on. Sometimes people are never heard from again. Armed with a fake story and a contraband phone to record interviews, Isobel is ready to expose Himlafall’s founder and get closure for the families of missing loved ones. But when she gets there, nothing goes to plan. Her contact is missing. The founder, Dr. Martina Hastings, knows how to get under Isobel’s skin in ways she didn’t anticipate. And all the while, the ghosts of the missing haunt her at every turn.
This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo, her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins.
Betrayed by love, Marin lives and works as a supply runner, sailing from island to island, delivering an array of goods with Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub as her crew. On one of her routine trips to the capital, Alyssium, Marin finds a revolution underway --- and her friend, Dax, in the line of fire. What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a member of her crew if he pretends to be her boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home. But against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile --- and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.
When Landon receives a letter from Rose --- the woman he once planned forever with --- he learns that their love story is over. She has undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past...and him. But Landon can't bear to lose the love of his life. Now living in Edinburgh, Rose's world is a blank canvas, and she's dating someone new. When Landon reenters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone --- it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost.
Angelica Glass spent decades as a social worker helping families struggling with poverty, addiction, abuse and neglect. Needing relief from work-related stress, she turned to walking as an outlet. What began as a way to incorporate more exercise into her busy life transformed into something extraordinary: a years-long odyssey in which Glass drew upon physical exercise, a close observation of the natural world, and long periods of introspection to reconcile with her own past. Between moments of awe as she explored her community and documented what she saw with her camera, she grappled with the turmoil of her early years in a complicated, challenging family, the aging process, long-held insecurities and grief.
Martha’s Vineyard, 1923. The sea was the gift that kept on giving to Lena Jameson’s father, Earl, a fisherman turned successful rumrunner who built up a small fortune smuggling liquor from offshore ships to thirsty customers back on the island. But when Earl and his entire crew are lost in a mysterious shipwreck that some whisper was no accident, his loved ones are left reeling and penniless. And Lena, who had been on the cusp of a college career in Boston, sees her future slipping away. Desperate to save her family, as well as her own hopes of escaping their small town, Lena decides to take over Earl’s rum-running business. But as buried secrets rise to the surface and the temptations of the glittering underworld pull Lena in deeper, everything she’s fought to protect soon hangs in the balance.
