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Sarah Rachel Egelman

Biography

Sarah Rachel Egelman


Sarah Rachel Egelman lives in New Mexico where she is a professor of Religion and Humanities. She also works and teaches in the Albuquerque Jewish Community. She enjoys writing, knitting, spending time outdoors and especially reading. She likes all genres and has a fondness for horror and nonfiction, as well as short stories, speculative fiction and literary novels.

Sarah Rachel Egelman

Reviews by Sarah Rachel Egelman

by Marcy Dermansky - Fiction, Humor, Women's Fiction

Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in. Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia, his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all?

by Karen Russell - Fiction, Historical Fiction

THE ANTIDOTE opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing --- not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. Karen Russell’s novel follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for people's memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

by Andrea Dunlop and Mike Weber - Nonfiction, True Crime

No one is more sympathetic than a mother whose child faces a life-threatening illness. But what if the mother is the cause of the illness? What if the sympathy is the point? Munchausen by proxy (MBP) has fascinated and horrified both professionals and the general public since this disturbing form of child abuse was first identified. But even as the public has been captivated by these tales of abuse and deception, there remains widespread misinformation and confusion about MBP. Are these mothers unfeeling psychopaths, or sick women who need help? And how can we protect the children whose lives are at stake? THE MOTHER NEXT DOOR offers a groundbreaking look at MBP from an unlikely duo: a Seattle novelist whose own family was torn apart by it, and the Texas detective who has worked on more medical child abuse cases than anyone in the nation.

by Lucy Rose - Fiction, Gothic, Horror

Margot and Mama have lived by the forest ever since Margot can remember. When Margot is not at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. People who have strayed too far from the road. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine and keeps them warm. Then she satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies. But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes. And when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her bid for freedom.

by Krystelle Bamford - Fiction, Magical Realism

Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with bickering about decades-old crises, the children decide they must set out to investigate themselves --- to the rickety chicken coop, the barn and its two troublesome horses, and into the woods that once comprised their late grandmother’s property. The more the children search, and the deeper they walk, the more threatening the woods become and the more lost they are, caught between their aunt’s home in the present day, their parents’ childhood home just through the trees, and the memory of the house their grandmother grew up in. Soon, what began as a quest for answers gives way to a journey that undermines everything they’ve been told about who they are, where they came from and what they deserve.

by Stacy Horn - Nonfiction, True Crime

On a warm summer evening in 1991, 17-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier. A compulsively readable hybrid of true crime and investigative journalism, THE KILLING FIELDS OF EAST NEW YORK reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots.

by Eiren Caffall - Dystopian, Fiction, Science Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents, and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality.

written by Uketsu , translated by Jim Rion - Fiction, Horror, Mystery

A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning. A child's picture of his home contains a dark secret message. A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbit hole that will reveal a horrifying reality. Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all.

by Ella Baxter - Fiction

WOO WOO follows Sabine, a conceptual artist on the verge of a photo exhibition she hopes will be pivotal, as she plunges deeper into her neuroses and seeks validation in relationships --- with her frustratingly rational chef husband, her horde of devoted Gen Z TikTok followers, and even a mysterious, potentially violent stalker. Accompanying her throughout are Sabine’s strange alter egos, from hyperrealistic puppets of her as a baby to the ghost of conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann, who shows up with inscrutable yet sage life advice.

by April Balascio - Memoir, Nonfiction

One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the “Sweetheart Murders” cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father’s dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective, and the rest is infamous true-crime history. In RAISED BY A SERIAL KILLER, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals and silent fear. Some part of her had always known what her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, was capable of, but the full truth of how she came to these revelations is as riveting as it is quietly terrifying.