Book Review: Carved in Ebony

 

Carved in Ebony

Lessons from the Black Women Who Shape Us

by Jasmine L. Holmes

Pub Date 02 Aug 2022

 Bethany House,  Bethany House Publishers

 Christian  |  Teens & YA 

I am reviewing a copy of Carved In Ebony, Lessons from the Black Women Who Shape Us through Bethany House Publishers and Netgalley:

Elizabeth Freeman, Nannie Helen Burroughs, or Charlotte Forten Grim, do these names sound familiar?  Have you heard of Sarah Mapps Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, or Maria Fearing? What about Sara Griffith Stanley, Amanda Berry Smith, Lucy Craft Laney, and Maria Stewart?

Some of these names may be familiar to you, most may not, but these women lived faithful and influential lives in a world that was filled with injustice. They worked to change laws, built schools, spoke to thousands, and shared the Gospel all around the world. And while history books may have forgotten them, their stories can teach us so much about how we can live today.

I give Carved in Ebony five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Babysitter

 

Babysitter

A novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Pub Date 23 Aug 2022 |

 Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,  Knopf

 Literary Fiction  |  Mystery & Thrillers

I am reviewing a copy of  Babysitter through Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and Netgalley:

Disclaimer due to subject matter and strong language not recommended for readers under sixteen!

In the last few years of the. 1970’s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences.

Included in this group of people, there is Hannah wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of abductions and killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.

Babysitter is a suspenseful and brilliantly orchestrated as well as engrossing novel.  Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.

I give Babysitter five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Just Keep Going

 

Just Keep Going

by Donna Blaber

Pub Date 15 Jul 2022 

 Lighthouse Media Group,  Lighthouse Books

 Children's Fiction  |  Middle Grade  |  Teens & YA

I am reviewing a copy of Just Keep Going through Lighthouse Media Group, Lighthouse Books and Netgalley :

Becky had always loved visiting her Dad in New Zealand, that is until she returns during the pandemic.  Bu now he’s got a baby with her new stepmum and everything has changed. Worse still, her windsurfer hasn’t arrived yet, so there’s nothing for her to do but wait for Mum who is stuck overseas.

After Becky finds a strange Now he’s got a baby with her new stepmum and everything has changed. Worse still, her windsurfer hasn’t arrived yet, so there’s nothing for her to do but wait for Mum who is stuck overseas.

I give Just Keep Going five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Deception

 

Deception

by Patricia Bradley

Pub Date 02 Aug 2022 

 Revell 

 Christian 

I am reviewing a copy of Deception through Revell and Netgalley:

Madison Thorn is comfortable with her move to the fraud and cyber division, after being forced to kill an FBI agent gone rogue in self-defense while working in the violent crimes unit for the Investigative Services Branch.  At least she doesn’t have to worry about numbers lying to her.  So she's less than thrilled when a white-collar crime investigation in Natchez, Mississippi, turns violent. She could also do without being forced to work with her former-childhood enemy-turned-infuriatingly-handsome park ranger Clayton Bradshaw.

After a woman who looks like Maddison is attacked on the same night Maddison’s Grandfather is shot, it becomes clear someone is out to get her.  Madison and Clayton will have to work together and suppress their growing feelings for one another--if they are to discover the truth before it's too late.

I give Deception five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: We Are Not Okay

 

We Are Not Okay

Elegy for a Broken America

by Christian Livermore

Pub Date 01 Oct 2022

 Indie Blu(e) Publishing,  Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Members' Titles

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  Nonfiction (Adult) 

I am reviewing a copy of We Are Not Okay, Elegy for a Broken America through Indie Blu(e) publishing and Netgalley:

I wanted to love this book, but I didn’t though there were good parts to this one I struggled to get through it.  But she did bring up some good points, including how America often treats its poor, and the lifetime of consequences poverty often brings.

Christian Livermore grew up a shy little girl in a turbulent family sunk in poverty, violence, substance abuse and mental illness. She ate government cheese, suffered from malnutrition and struggled to defend her body against threats both outside the house and within it. And even though she made it out, she has suffered a lifetime of consequences since: excruciating health problems, fear and shame. Especially shame. In We Are Not Okay, Livermore's deeply personal and moving essays explore what it means to grow up poor in America and ask whether it is possible to outrun the shame it grinds into your bones.

I give We Are Not Okay three out of five stars

Happy Reading!

Book Review: A Voice Out of Poverty

 

A Voice Out of Poverty

by Jillian Haslam

Pub Date 13 Sep 2022

 Independent Publishers Group,  Top Reads Publishing, LLC

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  Nonfiction (Adult) 

Jillian Haslam uses her story and her voice to speak for the poor and powerless in her heart-wrenching memoir which begins in the slums of Calcutta where she and her family are forced to live after British colonization ended.

At the age of eight Haslam first used her stubborn will to never give up, when she stood for hours at a tea shop, begging for a ladle of milk to keep her newborn sister from dying of starvation. 

By the time the reader finishes this book, they will wonder how someone so young could find the strength and tenacity to survive so much.

I give A Voice Out of Poverty five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Victoria England’s Best-Selling Author

 

Victorian England's Best-Selling Author

The Revolutionary Life of G W M Reynolds

by Stephen Basdeo, Mya Driver

Pub Date 30 Aug 2022 |

 Pen & Sword,  Pen & Sword History

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  History  |  Nonfiction (Adult) 

I am reviewing a copy of Victorian England’s Best-Selling Author: The Revolutionary Life of GWM Reynolds’s through Pen and Sword and Netgalley:

George W.M Reynolds’s was born in 1814 and died in 1879.  He was one of Victorian England’s best selling novelists.  He was the author of over 58 novels and short stories and his “penny blood” The Mysteries of London, serialised in weekly numbers between 1844 and 1848, sold over a million copies.  Reynolds was a controversial figure in his time Reynolds’s Mysteries, and its follow-up The Mysteries of the Court of London (1849–56), contained tales of crime, vice, and highly sexualised scenes. For this reason Charles Dickens remarked that Reynolds’s name was one “with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated.”   

But Reynolds was much more than a novelist he was lauded by the working classes as their champion and campaigned for universal suffrage. To further the working classes’ cause, he established two newspapers: Reynolds’s Political Instructor and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The latter newspaper, as Karl Marx recognised, became the principal organ of radical and labour politics. 

I give Victorian England’s Best Selling Author four out of five stars!

Book Review: the Ways We Hide

 

Ways We Hide

A Novel

by Kristina McMorris

Pub Date 06 Sep 2022 

 SOURCEBOOKS Landmark

 Historical Fiction  |  Women's Fiction 

I am reviewing a copy of Ways We Hide through Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley:

Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival, as a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country.  The ability to focus on her own survival sustains her even as World War 2 rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.

Yet for all her planning, Fenna doesn’t foresee being called upon by British military intelligence. Tasked with designing escape aids to thwart the Germans, MI9 seeks those with specialized skills for a war nearing its breaking point. Fenna reluctantly joins the unconventional team as an inventor. But when a test of her loyalty draws her deep into the fray, she discovers no mission is more treacherous than escaping one’s past.

The Ways We Hide is inspired by true accounts, and is a gripping story of love and loss, the wars we fight on the battlefields and within ourselves and the courage found in unexpected places.

I give Ways We Hide five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Fallout

 

Fallout

by Carrie Stuart Parks

Pub Date 13 Sep 2022 

 Thomas Nelson--FICTION,  Thomas Nelson

 Christian  |  Mystery & Thrillers 

I am reviewing a copy of Fallout through Thomas Nelson, and  Netgalley:

Samantha Williams craves simplicity after a difficult childhood.  She longs for jigsaw puzzles, lectures at the library, and the students she adores in her role as an elementary school art teacher in the dusty farming community of LaCrosse, Washington.

After an SUV crashes into the building wear Samantha teaches, her entire world is upended. Samantha manages to keep the children safe, but her car isn’t so lucky. Oddly, her purse—with her driver’s license, credit cards, and other identification is missing from the wreckage.

After authorities discover that the driver in the accident was shot seconds before the crash, Samantha quickly becomes entangled in increasingly strange events that have her constantly looking over her shoulder.

Samantha tried to forget the tragedy of her past long ago, to forget the tragedy of her past

I give Fallout five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: The Undercover Book List

 

The Undercover Book List

by Colleen Nelson

Pub Date 14 Sep 2021 

 Pajama Press 

 Children's Fiction  |  Middle Grade 

I am reviewing a copy of The Undercover Book List and Netgalley:

Jane Macdonald is a seventh grader who is lonely with her Dad overseas and  her best friend just moving across country.  But Sienna her best friend has left her with one last trick: a hidden message in a library book—the perfect plot to start a secret club and find Jane a new book-loving friend.

 

Tyson Flamand has had a reputation as a bad kid since fourth grade and there's no point fighting it when teachers always think the worst. So when he finds an anonymous note in the library looking for a nerdy new friend, he knows he's the last person in the world it could be meant for. But something makes him answer it anyway, and Tyson finds himself pulled into a secret book club where being hidden may be the first step to being truly seen.

I give The Undercover Book List five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: I’ll Be You

 

I'll Be You

A Novel

by Janelle Brown

Pub Date 26 Apr 2022 

 Random House Publishing Group - Random House,  Random House

 General Fiction (Adult)  |  Mystery & Thrillers  |  Women's Fiction 

I am reviewing a copy of I’ll Be You through Random House Publishing Group and Netgalley

When they were children Sam and Elli were two halves of a perfect whole:  Gorgeous identical twins, whose parents had trouble telling them apart at times.  They fell asleep to the sound of each other’s breath at night, holding hands in the dark. And once Hollywood discovered them, they became B-list child TV stars, often inhabiting the same role.

As adults their lives splintered though After leaving acting, Elli reinvented herself as the perfect homemaker: married to a real estate lawyer, living in a house just blocks from the beach. Meanwhile, Sam has never recovered from her failed Hollywood career, or from her addiction to the pills and booze that have propped her up for the last fifteen years.

Sam had not spoken to her sister since her destructive behavior finally drove a wedge between them. So when her father calls out of the blue, Sam is shocked to learn that Elli’s life has been in turmoil: her husband moved out, and Elli just adopted a two-year-old girl. Now she’s stopped answering her phone and checked in to a mysterious spa in Ojai. Is her sister just decompressing, or is she in trouble? Could she have possibly joined a cult? As Sam works to connect the dots left by Elli’s baffling disappearance, she realizes that the bond between her and her sister is more complicated than she ever knew.

I give I’ll Be You four out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Crime Writer

 

Crime Writer

by Dime Sheppard

Pub Date 01 Oct 2021 

 Ruby Books 

 Mystery & Thrillers  |  Romance 

I am reviewing a copy of Crime Writer, through Ruby Books and Netgalley:

Evie Bowland has serious problems, guns, bombs and murders, and that’s on a single page.

In her real life Evie is supposed be planning a wedding to adorable billionaire Daniel Bradley, but Evie is seriously snarled in the sixteenth book of her successful crime series. In fact, her protagonists are becoming impossible to wrangle: NYPD detective Carolyn Harding is volatile after a messy divorce, and Detective Jay Ryan has that heated look in his blue eyes again. They're both sick of being written. And frankly they're getting a little...physical. Evie is beginning to wonder if she's ever going to finish Book Sixteen and get them back into fiction where they belong.

When a homicide that is disturbingly familiar homicide surfaces in the city papers, it seems as if other, darker characters might have crossed the fiction-frontier too. In which case, Evie is in a lot of real-life trouble.

If she's going to survive it, Evie must face her own worst fears, and learn that real love can be the best way of writing her own story.

But can she change the ending?

I give Crime Writer five out of five stars! 

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Victims Are Like Birdhouses

 

Victims Make the Best Birdhouses

by Larry L. Franklin

Pub Date 02 May 2022

Independently Published

Biographies & Memoirs | Nonfiction (Adult)

I am reviewing a copy of Victims Make the Best Birdhouses through the author, Larry, L, Franklin,and Netgalley:

• Disclaimer the review below, deals with the subjects of physical and sexual abuse in childhood, if you don’t feel ready to read this, I completely understand.

Lee Franklin believed he should had known on that Summer Day in 1950, that the situation he had lived in was anything but normal. But he was the youngest and smallest of four boys, in a place where the unmistakable was passed off as normal. In 1992, a conversation with his Mother, when he turned fifty opened the door to repressed memories of physical and sexual abuse. The worst left him hugging the bathroom stool throughout the night. As his mind began to crumble, a piece here, a piece there, he learned that the trips to the barn were far from normal. Separating fact from fiction was like finding a gnat in the forest.

Victims Make the Best Birdhouses in one man’s journey from victim to survivor.

I give Victims Make the Best Birdhouses four out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

Book Review: Saving Aziz

 

Saving Aziz

How the Mission to Help One Became a Calling to Rescue Thousands from the Taliban

by Chad Robichaux

Pub Date 17 Jan 2023 

 Nelson Books,  Thomas Nelson

Christian

I am reviewing a copy of Saving Aziz through Nelson Books , Thomas Nelson and Netgalley:

It started as a prayer to save a best friend, and ended up becoming a mission to rescue more than seventeen thousand souls.

Chad Robichaux a former Force Recon Marine details the incredible rescue missions that evacuated not only his long-time friend and interpreter, Aziz, but also more than 17,000 Afghans and allies who were left in the grip of the Taliban's violent regime as the United States military withdrew from Afghanistan. 

Force Recon Marine Chad Robichaux and his friend and Afghan interpreter, Aziz, carried out over a hundred dangerous missions as team members on an elite JSOC (Join Special Operations Command) task force dedicated to capture or kill the highest levels of the Taliban's terrorist regime, during his eight special operation deployments to Afghanistan.  It was during those years, Chad was welcomed into Aziz's growing family, and the two men developed a brotherly bond as they stood against the Taliban's violent oppression.

Fourteen years after Robichaux's final deployment, in April of 2021, the Biden administration announced that the United States military would end its twenty-year occupation in Afghanistan and would pull its military forces from the country by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 Immediately, Robichaux knew he had to save Aziz and his family. As he began to organize efforts, he realized a greater need to help more of the Afghan people he had come to know and respect. As the deadline for withdrawal drew near, he formed a coalition of nonprofits called Save Our Allies and created Task Force 6:8, which consisted of twelve former special operations veterans, to evacuate American citizens, green card holders, and special immigration visa (SIV) applicants out of the volatile country. They successfully extracted 12,000 evacuees in a period of ten days and took them to the United Arab Emirates. Then, by partnering with several other nonprofits, they continued to evacuate an average of fifty people per day over the next few weeks so that more than 17,000 were rescued, the largest number for any rescue group and second only to the United States military.

After those rescue efforts, Robichaux carried out a two-man reconnaissance mission over the span of ten days that provided flight paths across the border into Tajikistan. Operating at night and tracked by the Russian KGB, they successfully evaded capture by the Taliban and Chinese special forces, and were the first on the ground providing real-time intelligence for outside intelligence agencies, which made way for additional evacuations.

I give Saving Aziz five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!