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Pamela Kramer

Biography

Pamela Kramer


Pamela Kramer began her obsession with books by reading the entire Wizard of Oz series when she was in kindergarten and first grade. She was a lawyer for many years and is retired from her job as a dual language gifted teacher in Highland Park, Illinois. Pamela enjoyed combining her love of books and her love of animals with her teaching. She got to read new picture books to younger students and used their reactions in her reviews. Through her website, she is able to recommend middle grade and young adult books to students. All the students and former students (and teachers) know where to go for good book recommendations! She served on the Illinois Bluestem steering committee (Illinois School Library Media Association Award) for several years.

Pam also loves to read adult books, and several authors whose books she has reviewed have become friends. She has rescued a variety of animals, from dogs and cats to rats and rabbits, and she loves nothing more than reading while cuddling with one of her four dogs or two cats. She always has a foster dog in her home as well. She has reviewed books online since 2010 and began writing about books for the now defunct Examiner.com website and later as a contributor to Huffington Post. She continues to review -- mostly on her blog, PamelaKramer.com. She spends school breaks reading as much as possible while also organizing and checking the massive piles of books in her home. Her favorite thing? Seeing a quote from one of her reviews on the back of a book!

Pamela Kramer

Reviews by Pamela Kramer

by Sandra Dallas - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western, Women's Fiction

1937. It’s been seven years since the dust storms started in Colorado. High school student Martha Helen Kessler and her family are luckier than most; they still eke out a living from the land. Even so, evidence of the Dust Bowl’s grim impact on families is everywhere. When Martha Helen’s compassionate mother insists they take in Otis Hobbs, a handsome drifter who saves a local boy from a vicious storm, she quickly discovers a darker side to their rural community. Suspicion, jealousy and prejudice grip their neighbors --- and emotions reach a frenzy after Martha Helen’s best friend, Frankie, disappears and is then found murdered. Ultimately, Martha Helen is forced to make sense of her conflicting feelings and loyalties in order to help find retribution and to reconcile the difference between the law and justice.

by Alice Henderson - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Alex Carter is thrilled to be in lush, tropical Hawaii for her new assignment: to study and protect hawksbill turtles. From global warming to poaching to the simple fragility of a turtle’s nest, these creatures are under constant threat. And as excited as Alex is to swim, explore and relax, she’s also ready to be these turtles’ fiercest protector. Alex looks forward to a break from the danger of her past assignments, but she soon finds that environmental crime can happen anywhere. As a massive hurricane approaches, armed thieves storm onto the beach where Alex and her volunteers are desperately trying to move turtle eggs to safety out of the storm surge. When the gunmen take one of her volunteers hostage, and Alex tracks them to a nearby paleontology museum, she suspects that there’s more to these mysterious criminals than meets the eye.

by Karen Robards - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Ireland, 1918. In a world brutalized by the Great War and devastated by the Spanish flu, 22-year-old Rynn Carmichael is suddenly pulled into the war of independence when Donal O’Reilly, the boy she has loved for most of her life, takes up gunrunning in support of the rebellion. Raised in a small Irish village on the shores of Donegal Bay, Rynn is working as a nurse in a convalescent home for soldiers wounded in the Great War when she overhears a British officer gloating over the trap that has been set for Irish gunrunners bringing a boat full of smuggled arms ashore. Knowing that Donal must be involved, she rushes out at midnight to warn the incoming boat, only to find herself caught up in a terrifying and tragic series of events.

by Sandra Brown - Fiction, Romance, Romantic Suspense, Suspense, Thriller

Two years ago, Detective Mitch Haskell lost his wife to a vicious act of retribution, and he has since attributed her murder to two men. Roland Malone is a ruthless executioner and drug dealer who fronts as a restaurant owner. He performs his handiwork at the biddings of Oz, the faceless kingpin of a drug trafficking operation whose name alone evokes terror. Detective John Bowie has forced Mitch to get therapy to sort himself out. Dr. Dylan Reede is immediately empathetic to the pain she senses beneath Mitch’s cavalier attitude and wisecracking. But from the moment he breezes into her office, Dylan finds it a struggle to maintain the professional and personal boundaries that keep her own tragic past at a safe distance. As Mitch begins to close in on Oz and Malone’s operation, they’re prepared to stop him by any means necessary. 

edited by Alice Hoffman - Essays, Nonfiction

Anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to share their life with a dog knows that the experience is both profound and transformative. Here, in this charming collection of essays, 15 celebrated authors share unforgettable tales of the dogs who left their pawprints on their hearts. With contributions from Isabel Allende, Chris Bohjalian, Bonnie Garmus, Roxane Gay, Emily Henry, Ann Leary, Tova Mirvis, Jodi Picoult, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, Adriana Trigiani, Nick Trout, Paul Yoon and Laura Zigman, THE BEST DOG IN THE WORLD captures the full range of the canine-human connection, from the joy of welcoming a new puppy to the heartache of saying goodbye to a beloved friend.

by Sonali Dev - Fiction, Women's Fiction

The Naik sisters escaped their traumatic past in Mumbai to come to the States, but their journeys have been vastly different. Simi is working toward a bright future as a pediatric nurse in a small town in Kentucky when Rupi shows up at her door in distress, on the run, and dragging trouble in her wake. With Rupi’s safety in jeopardy, the sisters hatch a desperate plan to keep her in the country: Rupi must get married --- and fast --- even if it means Simi recruiting the man she’s been secretly dating as her sister’s groom. As the big day inches closer, Simi and Rupi face a storm of wedding shenanigans and romantic surprises, not to mention sisterly jealousies. As the stakes and tensions rise, will their secrets tear them apart, or will they find a way to risk everything for love?

by Kate White - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Ten years after her daughter, Melanie, was murdered, Bree Winter is finally moving on with a new love, a new home and a new beginning. Then a deathbed confession from the convicted killer throws Bree’s life into a tailspin all over again. He readily confesses to murdering four girls. But not Melanie. At first, Bree and her ex-husband don’t buy a word of it. Until inconsistencies about the crime emerge. So does the dreadful feeling that the monster who shattered Bree’s family isn’t lying. The only way she can get to the truth is to power through the trauma and return to the town in upstate New York where Melanie’s life came to a brutal end. Not only could the real killer still be in their midst, but as Bree begins to dig through Melanie’s past, what she discovers calls into question everything she has believed --- about the crime and about Melanie herself.

by Kelley Armstrong - Fiction, Mystery

Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are entering a new chapter of life as parents to their six-month-old baby. Their family is hidden away in the sanctuary town of Haven's Rock where they can live safe and private lives. But when they encounter hikers too close to the borders of Haven's Rock, they realize they're in danger of being exposed. When they find one of the hikers dead the next day, they realize that their paranoia was justified, but they're no closer to finding out who these people were and what they were doing in the vicinity of Haven's Rock. Only by tracing the hikers' movements, as well as examining the recent behavior of their closest neighbors, the workers of a secretive mining camp, will they be able to figure out where the threat is coming from and shut it down.

by Kate Quinn - Fiction, Magical Realism

Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: Unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing that college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books. The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect.

by Sadeqa Johnson - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American Officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GIs, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes. Philadelphia-born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948. While serving in Mannheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, Jelka, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever. In 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all-white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity. KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives.