As the marketing copy says: ‘This enchanting tale of a cursed mythical creature and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her is “a daring, mesmerizing novel…single-handedly bringing magic realism up-to-date” (Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet).’
I really loved this book. It’s the stuff of fairy tales and Caribbean lore. In 1976, David is fishing off the island of Black Conch when he meets a mermaid named Aycayia. She is a big and powerful creature of the sea who is enamoured with his guitar playing. They meet several times in the same spot but one day David accidentally lures her into danger.
Two Americans have chartered a fishing vessel and catch Aycayia. They are thrilled with their luck and dream of the wealth they’ll have selling her to a museum.
David, under the cover of darkness, rescues Aycayia but he has another problem on his hands when she starts turning from a mermaid back into a young woman. Gossip, nosy neighbours, long-time grudges and all the vices of a small island collide with the beautiful love story between two lonely creatures.
Christine Estima’s debut work is a wonderful read. The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society weaves together the stories of many generations of women from an Arab family as they flee the Middle East in the nineteenth century, settle in Montreal, and then visit or return to their roots. These women are connected through time by their culture, their bravery, and their tenacity. The book is a collection of short stories but they feel connected like chapters of a novel. This is an impressive work.
Christine Estima draws on her own Lebanese, Syrian and Portuguese heritage to write incredible multicultural portrayals, especially of living in Montreal. There is also a dark undercurrent of cultural stereotypes and biases about women, but Estima’s characters challenge those notions and find a place for themselves.
The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society is a serious yet delightful book. It has an unusual trim size (7″ x 6″) making the whole package unique.
This jaw-dropping novel is about families being upended by violence. Olivia McAfee has escaped her abusive husband and has found a way to settle back into life in her hometown. Her son Asher is a hockey star and well liked. Ava Campanello has also escaped a violent husband and has settled in the same small town as the McAfees. Everything seems to be working out until her daughter ends up dead and the boyfriend is accused of her murder. The boyfriend is Asher.
Mad Honey covers so much ground. What is secret vs. private. What actually happens in the US legal system. How well kids mature or don’t, and the problem with gossip. There’s also a lot here about honey and beekeeping.
This is a novel that kept me up at night. There are so many questions. So many twists and turns. Will we ever know what happened to Lily? Is Asher innocent?
Two estranged siblings are reunited when their mother passes away and leaves them a parting message about family secrets and a lost daughter.
Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is set in present-day California and 1950-1960s Caribbean and London. Benny and Byron have grown up understanding that their parents were orphans from the West Indies who met in London then moved to the US. Instead what they discover from their mother’s recording is that they were high school sweethearts in the Caribbean until she was sold off to a gangster, who ended up murdered at the wedding reception, from which she ran away and was presumed dead. This novel is a real rollercoast about friendship, loyalty, and what we choose to say or remember about our past.
Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn is a heart-pounding novel of heroism and desperation. Ludmila (Mila) Pavlichenko is 15 when she is romanced by an ass of a man who gets her pregnant. He’s a doctor and incredibly demeaning to her, but Mila’s father knows high-ranking Soviets and they are married. Mila is a scholar and between working in a factory and studying at university, she is able to support her son with the help of her parents. But Hilter’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia upends her plans and suddenly she is working as sniper.
The callous nature of her husband meant that she was doing rifle training so she could be father and mother to her son. “Never miss” became her mantra and during the war, it meant she was a lethal hunter. Mila becomes known as Lady Death. She has two wartime romances and finds herself on the American goodwill tour to convince Roosevelt to send troops to help the Soviets. It’s in Washington DC where she befriends Eleanor Roosevelt.
The author’s note at the end of Kate Quinn’s novels are always informative and this one is extraordinary. This is the little-known story of an incredible woman who did remarkable things.
Tom Lake is an absolutely stunning book about love, how you don’t really know your parents, trauma, choice and destiny.
Ann Patchett is one of my favourite writers because she just settles into your brain like no other writer. This book is about a northern Michigan family caught up in the COVID pandemic who have to hunker down to get the cherries off the trees in their orchard. The families of labourers who normally come are not available. And if they don’t get the cherries off then it affects their livelihood. To pass the time, or to get away from the stress of the current time, the 3 grown daughters have asked their mother Lara to tell them about when she was an actress dating the now-famous actor Peter Duke.
What transpires is a beautiful look at the ways we love people, and how that love matures (or doesn’t depending on the person). I also felt that this novel was about the trauma of the pandemic, the existential dread, the what-ifs you ask about your own life.
Lara’s youngest daughter desperately wants to be an actor so she doesn’t understand how Lara stepped away from it all. Lara’s eldest daughter as a teenager truly believed that she was Peter Duke’s daughter and although she’s come around, the mistrust is still there between mother and daughter. And could their father be any kinder a human being? He is the loveliest character of them all, a steady rock throughout. In many ways, this story is about catharsis. For Lara, she is examining a time in her life that is seemingly behind her, but the more she considers the story from her daughters’ points of view, and goes deeper into that time herself, the more it’s clear that this is a past, unresolved trauma. It’s not behind her (yet), but without talking it through, there is no closure.
Ann Patchett is masterful in how she weaves in multiple stories about the different characters, but also brings in the richness of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Classics that I now must re-read in order to appreciate even more the rich talent on display in this novel.
You don’t need to read Our Town before reading Tom Lake but if you know the play then the novel is an even better read. Undoubtably you will read Our Town after reading Tom Lake so the publishers should really bundle these two together. The opening passage of Our Town still haunts me. It’s a beautiful play about everyday life and what we see (and miss) in the passage of a lifetime. Lara’s acting experience revolts around her role as Emily, and it’s made me appreciate Ann Patchett and Thorton Wilder all the more.
These quotes say it best: “This delicious combination of Clue and The Great British Bake Off kept me turning the pages all night!” —Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Only Murders in the Building meets The Maid in this darkly beguiling locked-room mystery where someone turns up dead on the set of TV’s hottest baking competition—perfect for fans of Nita Prose, Richard Osman, and Anthony Horowitz.
Six aspiring amateur bakers arrive to Grafton, a lovely Vermont estate run by Betsy Martin, nicknamed “America’s grandma”, for Bake Week. But things go off in the first episode. One contestant’s sugar is swapped for salt. The second episode has a contestant’s homemade orange essence ruined. Is it sabotage or accident? Nobody really knows.
Tensions run high between creator Betsy and the newly announced co-host Archie Morris. Perhaps Archie has his fingers in too many pies? The novel opens with full on suspense and each chapter and character takes us deeper into twists and turns that are tighter than a cinnamon roll.
I become a huge fan of Kate Quinn after her book The Shrines of Gaiety and I have since inhaled The Rose Code and The Alice Network. The Rose Code is a masterful spy novel that alternates between flashbacks to the the 1940s wartime activities of at Bletchley Park and the days leading up to the royal wedding in 1947.
Three headstrong women answer the call to join the war effort at Bletchley Park. They do not know what they are getting into. Osla is a beautiful and wealthy debutante who puts her fluent German to use as a translator. Mab is an east-end London powerhouse who is a towering beauty with a sharp set of eyebrows. And Beth is a mousey, downtrodden local girl with a panache for crosswords. She is a brilliant puzzle cracker and becomes one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts.
But Beth also sniffs out a traitor and finds herself locked up in a sanitarium before the war is over.
Osla, Mab, and Beth are estranged because of a series of small betrayals between the friends. It means that Beth’s accusations are buried and Osla and Mab are not aware of the traitor until they receive a message from Beth that she has managed to smuggle out of the sanitarium. Will they help her?
The Rose Code is a fantastic story about the layers of friendships, betrayals, and loyalty. It’s fast paced, fun, and taps into some of the real history of the Park. I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator did a great job of the various British accents and creating a veil of mystery.
On the Ball is a masterclass in the mental strategies coaches and athletes can use in sports, but it’s also full of personal anecdotes that resonate with parents of athletes and even working adults. There are tips here that work for work as well as they work for sport.
Michael Lodewyks has spent over 25 years coaching volleyball and tennis and this book is a massive brain dump of everything he’s learned and observed in his time. The book is well organized with key takeaways at the end of each section and a big-picture plan as a final summary of the tips. The strategies are well tested in professional sports beyond volleyball and tennis and again this book really is a resource for anyone wanting to up their game.
The book Bomb by Steve Sheinkin is an absolutely fascinating read about what was going on at Los Alamos during WWII and the mad race for physicists around the world to figure out atomic weapons. Oppenheimer is certainly a presence in the book, but where the film delves into the behind-the-scenes trial, this book digs into the many different personalities working on atomic energy. I wish I’d read this book before seeing the film.
If you like history and spy stories then this is for you. It’s billed for age 10-14 but don’t let that dissuade you. Sheinkin offers up a rich history lesson, in plain language, that is spine-tingling.
Check out the excerpt on the author’s website. Or just go buy the book (Amz).