My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Fen closed her eyes at the memory, and before long others nudged their way into her mind. His spectacles with their round, dark rims and his dark brown eyes behind them. The way his neck always smelt of Palmolive soap, no matter what time of day she embraced him. His insistence on always carrying a penknife, a handkerchief and a small ball of string ‘just in case’.

 

And then there was Edith from the East End of London, tall and awkward and with a fondness for anything fanciful. She would be a fairy or a princess if she could, but God had decided, in his great wisdom, that instead she should be five foot nine of clumsiness, and for this she found it hard to forgive him.

 

She was dark-haired and slim, her face pinched and sallow, as if she had spent the war drinking vinegar rather than fighting off Germans.

My Review:

 

I enjoyed this engaging tale from beginning to end, but I was flummoxed to see it was classified as Cozy Mystery, hmm. It was a well-researched historical with the well-held tension of a suspenseful novel as well as trickles of humor and amusing observations, three clever murders, betrayals, peril, sabotage, sleuthing, theft, several well-nuanced mysteries, oddly curious and fascinating characters, and a strong and smart female protagonist. Add that all together and this seemed like a full-fledged historical mystery to me, so I sought the counsel of the all-wise Mr. Google who led me to Cozy Mystery.com – and yes, there actually is such a thing, and found an article/post titled What Makes a Cozy Just That?” And, well… A Dangerous Goodbye fits the definition… color me schooled!

The pleasantly evocative writing style and well-crafted storylines were expertly paced and held my attention throughout while keeping me tethered to my Kindle and taunting my inquisitive nature. I spun and cast aside numerous theories but this sly author tossed in more than a few red herrings among the clues, the minx. This was an excellent kick-off for a new series, and I hope I’m paying attention when the subsequent installments appear. I’m a fan and apparently I’m now an ardent cozy mystery reader – who would have ever suspected that?

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THE KIDS ARE GONNA ASK
By Gretchen Anthony

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

Chef Bart served a buffet of appetizers and created a new cocktail called the “Truth Hurts”—one-part whiskey, three parts Fireball, and served in a glass rimmed with habanero pepper oil… He handed Maggie the inaugural glass. “You’re either swallowing fire or breathing it.”

 

George used to accuse her of being part earthworm— always making her way into the sun but forgetting how easily she wilted. “What am I going to do the day I come home to find you all shriveled up on the sidewalk?” he’d say.

 

For example, she found a white paper online about a woman named Sarah Adelbaum in Poplar Springs, Idaho, who had EKGs documenting her ability to match her heartbeat almost identically to Battle Hymn of the Republic and Yankee Doodle. Ms. Adelbaum’s quality of life was virtually unaffected and, even more, the only complaint she listed was that her heart didn’t have a wider catalog of music.

 

One woman, Alexis DuVrey posted a bedtime blessing for Thomas and Savannah every night at the same time. He only knew this, of course, because Sam Tamblin thought it was hysterical. “May the energy of the universe overwhelm those spirts that would do you hard,” she wrote one night. It was obviously an innocent and unfortunate series of typos, but ever since, Sam couldn’t resist calling on the “the spirts” to do him “hard.”

 

I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.

 

My Review:

 

I am decidedly enamored with this author; I enjoyed her bitingly clever Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners and hoped I was in for a similar treat in picking her second offering. Ms. Anthony excels at unique and oddly enticing characters who are more than a tad off-center. And while the peculiar characters in this tale were not always admirable or likable, they were achingly realistic and gaining hard-won insights while learning painful life lessons in an extremely public manner. My favorite characters of The Kids Are Gonna Ask were the grandmother/guardian Maggie and the secondary cast members of Nadine and Chef Bart. Chef Bart, and in particular Nadine – while only a teen, were the type of human beings we all wished we were and or were even capable of being.

The writing was humorously and keenly perceptive, unfailingly engaging, and laced with cunning and witty scenarios and amusing brain-tickling twists such as the simple weekly Podcast that thrusts the teenage twins from obscurity into instant fame after their small independent production went viral when featuring an unusually odd dinner guest of their grandmother who imparted a rather bizarre in-utero twin-eating anecdote which was soon dubbed as “Zombie Baby.” The twins decided to parlay their sudden success into delving into their origin story to track down their biological father, who was completely unknown to them and had rarely been discussed by their deceased mother. Tested loyalties, anxieties, betrayals, revelations, humiliations, tears, devastations, and epiphanies occurred along their journey and the superbly evocative and emotive writing kept me right there with them every step of the way.

I am more than eager to see who and what the profoundly perceptive Ms. Anthony hones in on next.

GRETCHEN ANTHONY is the author of Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, which was a Midwestern Connections Pick and a best books pick by Amazon, BookBub, PopSugar, and the New York Post. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Medium, and The Write Life, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.

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A Little Bit of Grace
by Phoebe Fox

From the bestselling author of Still Mine and Still Water—PI Clare O’Dey is on the hunt for two missing persons. Little does she know she’s the one being hunted.

With an MFA in Creative Writing, Stuart has been praised by New York Times as “a sensitive writer who has given Clare a painful past and just enough backbone to bear it.” Stuart is also the founder of Writerscape (18.2K Instagram followers), an online space for hopeful and emerging writers, a former high school and adult educator, and currently coaches competitive hockey.

The Heart of a Peach
by Jess B. Moore

 

 

Olivia Hamilton can do no wrong. Or at least that’s what the community of Fox River, North Carolina thinks of the odd but sweet young lady. She’s hiding a past she’d rather forget, engaged to the town’s most eligible bachelor, and longing for someone to see past the mask she wears. Olivia wants to find herself, forgive herself, and fall in love with someone who sees and embraces her flaws.

Denver MacKenna grew up the fiddle-playing prodigy of not only his hometown of Fox River but of North Carolina and the surrounding states. He plays obsessively and tours as often as possible, escaping a life of loneliness at home. Until he meets a beautiful siren who calls to him and has him making plans to settle down. Denver knows it’s wrong to covet the elusive Olivia, but finds himself inexplicably drawn to the brief glimpses she gives him of her true self.

The Heart of a Peach is the sixth book in the Fox River Romance series but can be read as a stand-alone heartwarming novel.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I settled in with my coffee. Bless whoever invented coffee. I savored every drop.

 

My father had liked me better before puberty, when I’d been his little girl… Everything changed as my body developed, and as my once kind father warned me what would happen if I let boys look at me. He never talked about them touching me, only looking, condemning me for merely existing.

 

To say my mood had bottomed out would be an understatement. I’d gone past a mix of worry and exasperation to a new level of morose. So low, I used the word morose and felt that shit in my soul.

 

My Review:

 

This was a sweet, satisfying, and lovely tale encompassing the genres of women’s fiction, family drama, small-town, and contemporary romance. I reveled in the transformation of the character of Olivia, although I initially had concerns I could appreciate her, as she was merely a veneer, and suffering in silence.

But to say I adore this author’s work is a gross understatement, and I strive not to be gross in any manner. 😉 Not that I’m always ladylike, as the character of Olivia was expected to be by her oddly uptight parents. No, I’m far from being a lady nor do I aspire to such nonsense, I’m proud to be a strong, sassy (and often brassy) woman. But Olivia tried, so very hard, under constant and unrelenting pressure to be just that, to please her savagely peculiar parents – whose ideal seemed to be a 1940s time warp when fathers bartered and often treated their daughters like livestock.

Other than a brief spree of early teenage rebellion, Olivia had adhered to a sheltered and isolated existence with strict supervision, a plethora of bizarre rules such as no coffee (which is cruel and unusual punishment if you ask me), and sky-high expectations while still living at home under their thumb at the age of twenty-four.   She had been tediously groomed to be a trophy wife and repeatedly told she wasn’t capable of much else. She fell in line and offered no resistance, but was miserable, constantly on edge and anxious of a misstep of their thousands of rules.

Of course she was!  I’m surprised she could sit erect having lost track of her spine… I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stick with this tale as the weak and fretful Olivia was chapping my feminist posterior… Had it been an unfamiliar author, I probably would have backed away with a DNF, but in this word maven I do trust, so I rolled my eyes and continued with a tense jaw until the introduction of the delectable snack of Denver MacKenna, and I was instantly enamored with his thoughtful, kind, and gentle demeanor. Sigh, and I was totally gone for this tasty treat the more I read. Denver was THE superlative BBF. His calm and steady nature was the perfect tonic to balance out Olivia’s debilitating self-doubt and anxieties and gave her the strength and courage to blossom.  I wants me one of those!

As is her style, Ms. Moore’s engaging arrangements of words were easy to follow yet told an unusually insightful, perceptive, and profoundly observant story with real-world issues, all the feels, and recognizable yet uniquely conflicted characters. She deftly slipped in updates and threads of the previously featured characters in this delightfully ongoing series while maintaining a strong standalone storyline in the current installment.   The little pea in my brain is already rattling and eager to see what entertaining tale she next conjures from her ever sparking and imaginative gray matter.

 

The Night Swim
by Megan Goldin

My Rating:

Favorite Quote:

 

“Objectivity is so last century. Didn’t you get the memo?” said Pete. “These days everybody has an opinion. Whether they know what they’re talking about, or not. Usually it’s the latter.

 

My Review:

 

 

This was clever storytelling.   The tension and intrigue were held to a taut and ever ratcheting level throughout this intense and arresting tale.   My curiosity was making me itch, as were the realistic, traumatic, and dramatic storylines of the brutality, pettiness, and corruption of small-town living and family drama.

The writing was profoundly engaging and action-packed with evocative, striking, and poignant depictions that were maddeningly parceled out, well-crafted, and inhabited by deeply flawed yet compelling and true-to-life characters, some of whom were monstrously all too familiar to me having grown up in a similarly inbred small town. My mind spun with theories and while there was no way the little pea in my brain could have solved this shrewdly plotted and cunning paced tale, and I truly didn’t see this ending coming, I did come close with more than a few bits and pieces in my final hypotheses. Megan Goldin has mad skills and lifelong fangirl.

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Rules of the Road
by Ciara Geraghty 

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

But she’ll be stressed about it and pretending she’s not stressed at all, which, in my experience, makes the thing you’re stressed about even more stressful.

 

This must be a swanky part of London because the charity shop is like a proper boutique with an accessories section and an immaculately turned-out young woman with terrifying eyebrows behind the counter and a bright, fresh smell that has no bearing on old, discarded clothes and worn-out shoes.

 

Vera rummages through a chest of drawers in the corner, dropping various bras and scarves on the floor until she finds a T-shirt with a picture of Tom Jones’s face on the front and the word “Sexbomb” printed below it.

 

Dementia likes the quiet. I picture the disease like an olden day’s librarian; all tutting and shushing. And usually I oblige.

 

The awful thing about thoughts is there’s no getting away from them. They’re right there. Going around and around on a track in your head like a toy train.

 

Motorbikes are on my list of terrors. High on the list. I’d prefer the girls to tell me they were, I don’t know, drug addicts, rather than owners of a motorbike. You can always go to rehab. But there’s no coming back from the morgue.

 

There is a collection of words, queueing at the back of my throat. Jostling against the back of my teeth. If I open my mouth, they will tumble out and none of them will be sufficient. None of them will be enough.

 

My Review:

 

This poignant and emotive story held a highly unusual premise and was rather ingeniously plotted and narrated through the highly anxious, introspective, and frustrated lens in the first person POV of the main character of Terry. The writing style was agile, evocative, and cleverly amusing as well as heart squeezing. If you were hoping for a fast-paced adventure and a road trip full of hi-jinx, you need to keep looking. This is a thoughtfully written yet highly engaging character-based tale with real-world issues while generously seasoned with humorous observations and vibrant imagery.

 

Two best friends, Iris and Terry, along with Terry’s elderly dementia patient father, impetuously struck out on a journey from Dublin to Zurich in Terry’s older car, to complete a personal mission for Iris, one that Terry hoped would not conclude as Iris had meticulously planned. Terry had insinuated herself into Iris’s plan at the last minute hoping to change the end result before reaching their destination.

Iris was besieged with the progressive physical deterioration, discomforts, and limitations of a chronic disease and did not relish living the remainder of her life trapped in her body – which is an issue that resonated intensely with me, as this is a personal fear of my own. Terry’s elderly father’s advancing Dementia was a constant concern and bone wearying challenge, which was deftly and sensitively handled with a surprisingly informative and often humorous approach to the complications.

Their odyssey was slow, quite arduous, and fraught with anxieties and a plethora of imagined catastrophes for Terry, a nervous driver who was afraid of the motorway and drove so slowly that even elderly drivers honked and swore at her. The trio experienced numerous detours and escapades as well as eye-opening insights and out of her comfort zone adventures that powered profound changes for Terry. The ending was not one I expected yet was realistic and surprisingly satisfying as I continue to ruminate over Ms. Geraghty’s clever missive. I have a feeling these characters are going to continue to inhabit my headspace for quite some time.

 

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Ciara Geraghty was born and raised in Dublin. She started writing in her thirties and hasn’t looked back. She has three children and one husband and they have recently adopted a dog who, alongside their youngest daughter, is in charge of pretty much everything.

The Switch
by Beth O’Leary

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

“Well, she better not leave it too long,” Betsy says. “I am eighty!” I smile at that. Betsy’s eighty-five. Even when she’s trying to make the point that she is old, she can’t help lying about her age.

I look down into the tea leaves. Letitia’s shoulders start shaking before I see what she sees… The tea leaves look like … genitals. Male genitals. It couldn’t be more distinct if I’d tried to arrange it that way on purpose. “I think it means good things are coming your way… That, or it’s telling me the tea-leaves game is a load of cock and balls.”

Leena keeps telling me that there are good men out there, that you have to kiss a few frogs, but I’ve been smooching amphibians for almost a year now and I am losing. The. Will.

It’s quite all right,” I tell her. “I’m seventy-nine. I may seem like an innocent old lady to you but that means I’ve had fifty extra years to see the horrors the world has to offer, and whatever that was, it’s got nothing on my ex-husband’s warty behind.

My Review:

 

This was great fun and my first experience reading Beth O’Leary and I’d gladly enlist for a lifetime of more of the same, she has mad skills! The Switch sparkled with clever levity, snarky observations and insights, sneaky wry humor, and razor-sharp wit. I gleefully indulged in a pleasantly entertaining day of fully engaged reading while giggle-snorting and smirking my way through this delightfully penned tale. Relevant social issues and concerns were laced throughout in a thoughtful and engaging manner while still amazingly maintaining an amusing tone overall.

The characters were fully inhabited, honorable, uniquely peculiar, realistically flawed, and significantly struggling with a variety of rather serious concerns, yet expending their energies creatively and in the intent of the betterment of others. I adored them although I found myself favoring the unpredictable antics and verbal exchanges of the elder contingent quite a bit more than the younger set.

And I hit a bevy of new words for my Brit Words and Phrases List with maungy – sulky or peevish, shambolic – chaotic and disorganized, and sling your hook – telling someone to go away.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I hope her grandmother rots in that special circle of hell reserved for bigots…

 

She doesn’t know if she blames him or pities him, hates him or loves him. All she knows is there is enough shame to go around.

 

She’s his training analyst. Makes her sound like a pair of wheels on the back of a bike, if you ask me.

 

“I told Mr. Rosenblum I wasn’t Jewish… I thought I ought to tell him. I mean, after the business with the menorah and everything.” “What did he say?” “That nobody’s perfect.”

My Review:

 

This was an intense yet gripping read with storylines steeped in angst, despair, and human and inhuman tragedy (which don’t rank among my favorite things), yet the quality of the writing was phenomenal and kept me engrossed and fully engaged. I was hooked – I was starving, I was tense, I was cold, I felt unwashed, I was THERE!

Ms. Feldman’s uniquely evocative arrangements of words were powerful, emotive, poignant, transportive, and thoughtfully plotted. This epic tale involved multiple storylines that laced together toward an entirely unexpected and somewhat indeterminate ending. Each thread as tautly written, mysteriously secretive, and anxiously risky of perilous discovery as the next. Her characters were enigmatic, deeply flawed, profoundly insightful, and entirely human. I was pulled into their edgy vortex of imminent danger and impending doom, not just from the brutal cruelty of the Nazi invaders, but more disturbingly, from the unrepentant savagery of the French citizenry as they turned on each other amidst the escalating tensions and unrelenting subjugation of their occupation as well as the aftermath.

There were several instances that required I put my Kindle down, walk away, and seek solace in a vat of wine… the most ruinous was near the end when I found myself totally devastated by a particular loss, and of the most unexpected of characters.   Ms. Feldman has strong word voodoo and a new fangirl.

ELLEN FELDMAN, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Terrible Virtue, The Unwitting, Next to Love, Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (translated into nine languages), and Lucy. Her novel Terrible Virtue was optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film.