Fragments of Light
by Michele Phoenix

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Every year—every year—I tell myself that it’s just a routine check… and that millions of women go through this without anything bad coming of it, but still … I sit in this room that’s clearly designed for optimism and calm, and it’s all I can do not to write an obituary in my mind.

Truly good men are as rare as rocking horse poo

“He’s not much of a talker, but he sure looks out for people.” A sad sort of envy hummed somewhere in the back of my mind. “You’re a very fortunate woman,” I said. “I know that now.” She laughed. “Didn’t always, mind you. But all these years later, when the frustrating stuff has settled into normal, it’s easier to see the treasure in the trash.”

“Pulled a Casper.” When I looked at her in confusion, she added, “Ghosted you. But not in a friendly way.”

When I was little and things would frustrate me, she’d tell me to give time the time it needs.

My Review:

This was an intensely emotive and heartrending tale that intertwined two narrations until they slowly and thoughtfully merged near the conclusion. The writing was staggeringly insightful and bruised my heart but I fell right into the shifting sands and curiously evocative and compelling nuances of both timelines, one a harrowing period in history and life-altering experiences for a young GI during WWII, and the other a distressing and devastating turn of events for a cancer survivor in modern times. Connected by a gossamer-thin thread being the vibrantly colorful and spirited character of Darlene, who was the relative of one and friend to the other, and who happened to be my favorite above all others. She was a colorful and spry little septuagenarian dynamo and what I aspire to be at any age.

Terrible things happened to good people in both soul-stirring narratives and I was engaged in their tale and as eager as the characters to unravel several maddening dead-end mysteries as well as the complicated connubial questions and issues in the current timeline.   Their issues were often painfully raw, keenly plotted, and shrewdly paced while keeping the curiosity primed.   Michele Phoenix is an agile and deft storyteller.

About the Author

The Last Charm
by Ella Allbright / Nikki Moore

A moving and heartwarming love story perfect for fans of Me Before You and One Day in December…

Leila’s charm bracelet tells a story of love, a story of loss, a story of hope.

This is the story of her … and the story of Jake.

When Leila Jones loses her precious charm bracelet and a stranger finds it, she has to tell the story of how she got the charms to prove she’s the owner. Each and every one is a precious memory of her life with Jake.

So Leila starts at the beginning, recounting the charms and experiences that have led her to the present. A present she never could have expected when she met Jake nearly twenty years ago…

My Rating:

Favorite Quote:

‘Along with my dad, my grandad taught me about the kind of person I want to be… Someone who can look at themselves in the mirror and be proud. Someone,’ I finish, my voice echoing through the church, ‘who makes the people around them better just for knowing them. That’s what he gave me,’ I say in a fierce voice. ‘That’s who he was. I’ll miss him, but he’ll still be with us all, because every time one of us does something good that we can be proud of, and every time we look in the mirror and feel it, he’ll be there.’

My Review:

I am ruined – Nikki Moore broke me and turned me inside out more than once. This crafty author hit all the feels, several times each and with a poignancy that still stings my eyes and constricts my throat when I consider how the events were staged. Ms. Moore’s character development was nothing short of phenomenal with a full cast of oddly compelling and uniquely damaged individuals.   I never fully joined team Leila as she was an immature and self-absorbed prickly pear who was often overflowing with resentment; prone to stubborn, impulsive, and hypersensitive behaviors; and was rather horrid, petty, and harsh in her treatment of the lovely Jake.   Jake had numerous challenges of his own and was undeserving of her vile comments and wrath, yet he accepted her abuse as he had his horrific childhood. Jake’s storylines were tragic so, of course, I adored him!

The writing was emotive and left a deep bruise on my coronary muscle. Despite her rather prolific career with words, this was my first exposure to the agile scribblings and emotive storytelling of Nikki Moore/Ella Allbright, and while I was conflicted most of the way through and eager to administer a few well-primed pinches to the bratty main character, I would not have been able to walk away from this complex and maddeningly paced tale had my hair been on fire.

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?

Amazon / B&N / GP/ Apple  / Audible 

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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.

The Perfect Hideaway
(Full Bloom Farm #3)
by Alys Murray

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.

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