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4.5 Stars “If you only knew in your own heart how many hardships you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, you would stay here with me and be the lord of this household and be an immortal.” —Homer Henry Drummond is one of the main characters whose story intertwines with others, and it is his story that begins more or less begins as his tenth birthday arrives, the same day that his parents are murdered, an act that will colour the rest of his days. ”I’d urge you to remember that the two most powerful warriors in earthly existence are love and understanding.” With enough humour to keep you smiling often while reading this imaginative story, as well as enough twists and turns to keep you on your toes, and enough sinister touches to be glad of the light, I loved this story! ”It’s a veritable mélange of all that is great in a story. It’s allegorical and it’s pulse-pounding.” Ansbro’s imagination is abundant and on display, and despite the pulse-pounding, darker moments, this left me with more of a feeling of joyfulness overall. I loved the pace of this story, which took off from the first pages, following a few intertwined stories, and I loved the references to various authors and philosophers, the classics, and how clearly the author’s distinct voice was felt while I was reading this, and feeling the somewhat Sherlock Holmes meets Charles Dickens essence to this. At its heart, this is a good vs. evil story, and as such it does have some scenes that has some violence, but the violence is not gratuitous or overly descriptive. It is a reminder that bad things do happen, and I felt that Ansbro conveyed the line between right and wrong brilliantly. I loved that early on I became familiar with each character’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, their individual personalities coming more to life as I read on. While not all of the characters were equally lovable (some not even likeable – but interesting? Oh, yes!), overall I loved the journey that this story took me on, and the glimpse of Paradise which was revealed to me.

Set in the early 1980s NYC, when AIDS is an unacknowledged epidemic. Ava works for NYC’s Health Dept. Struggling with her mental illness, becomes frustrated with the city’s lack of interest in helping, and opens a home for women with AIDS. Ysabel is one of her “charges,” and Ava cares deeply for Ysabel, and later for Ysabel’s infant son when Ysabel dies. Ava’s daughter, Milly, is an artist married to Jared. They live in the Christodora, a building in the East Village. Millie meets young Mateo, and ultimately Milly and Jared adopt a very young Mateo. The neighborhood surrounding the building at night becomes seedier, filled with derelicts and drugs. Milly’s friend Drew is bit of a wild child in her early years. You can see, feel, each of the issues they worry over, the problems they face, the dilemmas they create. Each person is so real; their personal stories are so developed and well conveyed. This is a book that people will talk about, with wonderfully drawn characters, covering over 40 years, spanning from NYC to sunny California, drug addictions, AIDS, adoptions, families, in this impressive piece of work, even more so when you consider this is a debut novel. It’s a testament to families, those we are born with and those we create by our literal or figurative adoption of others, the ability to forgive others, and maybe even forgive ourselves.

In the early 1960s, Virgil and his wife, Mavine, own a gas station in Eden Hill, Kentucky. He named it “Osgood’s” because that’s his last name and it’s a good name. People rarely come to Eden Hill as their destination, so when a young husband and his pregnant wife drive up to Osgood’s, looking for directions back to the highway, it’s noticed. When he pauses at the lot with a “For Sale” sign directly across from Osgood’s, it nearly causes a commotion. Virgil is also concerned about Mavine. You see, when Mavine was getting her hair done that Friday afternoon, she read a Pageant Magazine that included an article by a leading expert about marriage. With a helpful quiz to determine the state of one’s marriage. Up until then, Mavine had been so busy with other things in her life that she hadn’t paid much attention, but not she saw their marriage was in serious trouble. After Mavine tearfully hands Virgil her copy of Pageant, worn down from her worrying.“Question Two: How long has it been since you and your husband have had an intimate romantic dinner together? She had checked, ‘six months or more.’ This didn’t make sense at all, because Mavine had cooked a full meal almost every night of their entire married life.”Puzzled, he goes back to contemplating what to do about the gas station moving in across the street, but you can’t solve everything in one day. Many thanks for the ARC provided by Tyndale House Publishers, NetGalley and author Bill Higgs.

The setting, while bitterly cold even at the start, is beautifully revealed through Fagan’s lovely prose. The characters are so utterly normal underneath their quirks and unconventionality, so relatable. Even Dylan MacRae, a rather unusual soul, who leaves his family’s Soho theatre behind, following his mother’s wish, carrying his mother, and grandmother back to the Scotland’s highlands of her younger years. Stella, a young trans-girl, and her exceptional mother Constance. At their core, these are just everyday people going about their everyday lives under newly extraordinary circumstances. All the while news continually shows footage of this new “Ice Age” on their horizon. Despite these predictions, this floating iceberg of significant proportions changing the climate of the world, the focus is on making do through the winter, waiting for the Spring, with hope and appreciation for the beauty in their changing environment. The parhelia – three suns appearing in the sky. The frost flowers made from curls of ice, each petal perfection only winter can create, this newly forming world is seen through appreciative and hopeful eyes. While global warming is central to the overall picture, this is really about three somewhat dispirited, but strong individuals, each with a unique and compelling story of their own, and how, and when, their lives become entwined.

The small town where the Bell family lives is struggling, last year’s crops were meager, and the economic impact of the Depression is felt by everyone. The Bells were farmers. Annie, the mother, has known the loss of a young child, and she spends her days carrying this ghost of her daughter within her through her days. While she loves and cares for her children Birdie and Fred, she longs for way she felt before her heart knew this pain, when her dreams were full of hope for a bright future. Those early days living in a sod hut they built themselves, she felt alive and connected to her life, part of the farm. Birdie, on the verge of sixteen, unknowingly echoes these same thoughts and feelings; she wants nothing more than a life with her beloved, far away from here. A better life, a happier life, not her mother’s life. Fred, Birdie’s younger brother, communicates through signs, writing his thoughts. Lately, he writes in the dust, it covers everything, their food if they’re not quick to sit down and eat it. Fred follows the chickens and cows, fascinated by everything they do. He wanders, watching the birds building their massive nest out of wire. Fred is like his father, Samuel, a farmer, and takes pleasure in the solitude. Samuel remembers the “before” of life, loves farming. He finds peace here on this land, but he finds himself questioning what it is that God wants from him. This story is about this place and time, but it is the people that own the story,

Ivan has spent all of his 17 years in the Mazyr Hospital in Belarus. Born with severe physical deformities, he’s inquisitive, very well read and has one favorite nurse, Natalya, and little use for anyone else. When Polina arrives, he watches her somewhat from afar. She’s different, more alive. Beautiful. She doesn’t seem to belong there, but clearly she must. He becomes her champion. She shares her music, he shares his books. She shares her stories, piece by piece. He has no real story; he has no parents. She sees the real Ivan, and Ivan sees the real Polina. They see themselves in each other.When he sees something he views as pure and good, he not only recognizes it, he holds onto it. He’s all teenage boy one minute, and a gallant knight on a white horse the next. It’s heartbreakingly sweet and tender one minute and filled with filled with teenaged fantasies the next. This boy that had never allowed himself to want beyond the comfort of a moment, unexpectedly has a goal for the future. He writes, with great difficulty, on the pages that become the story of his life, of Polina’s life, of love in this most unlikely of places. These pages that tell their story. He must tell her story, their story, so the world will come to know her, so that they will know, will remember. Heartfelt debut novel, which serves as a reminder of what is important in life, it’s simple. It’s love.

Oh what a tangled web… Fairview, Connecticut is a nice sized, somewhat well-to-do town, not so small that everyone knows everything about everybody, but small enough to know who is who when fifteen year-old Jenny is attacked, raped in the woods outside a nice home in this nice town where she has just left a party of her peers. One of the doctors suggests a medical course of action that will effectively wipe out all memory of the rape from Jenny’s mind. Since this needs to be done as soon as possible after the incident, any memories, any identification of anyone involved would be effectively wiped away. Of course, everyone knows what happened, this isn’t meant to prevent Jenny from being aware that it happened, just to keep her from “reliving” the nightmare over and over again. How everything comes together is the story between the pages. The narrator leads you down many paths, following the stories of the parents, individually, each of their unhappy backgrounds, their friends, the therapist treating Jenny and several of his other patients, his family, etc. All of these stories manage to connect by the end. “Thrillers,” in general, are not really my favorite genre, typically I like to be able to sleep at night, but this was a really interesting psychological story with several twists and turns... the various twists in the story were unexpected, as well. St. Martin’s Press and author Wendy Walker provided me with an advanced copy for reading and review

I did not want to put this book down. I found myself picking up the book again, just to read just a little more, just a few more pages… I was mesmerized from the start. Beautifully written, a story that hooks you from the very beginning. While you know some facts from the start, that there will be a disaster that takes place unexpectedly, it takes away nothing from this lovely debut novel by Midge Raymond. Deb Gardner has been going to Antarctica for years, at first for her love for the penguins and their environment, but it’s become more than that to her. This is the place where she feels most like herself, where she’s able to just be. Originally drawn to the penguins for their appearance, she has learned their ways, the importance of their partner. She loves their “ecstatic cry,” the sound they make when reunited with their partner. The months of the year when she is back in Oregon are just to allow her to be here. And then there’s Keller Sullivan, a former practicing attorney who walked away from it all in search of something with more meaning. A life that wouldn’t remind him of his former life, and all the heartaches it included. A place so different from his life near Boston that it can’t remind him of what he’s lost. There are multiple additional characters, passengers on the ship(s) they are on, some are also crew, their stories all add more dimension to the overall view of the dilemma regarding who (and how often) should people be visiting this area of the world.

“It was an ordinary fall until the gypsies came...” Shelk, Pennsylvania is a small mining town in Pennsylvania lying along the Appalachian Mountains, the kind of town where everyone knows everyone else, and nothing much changes. Daily life is a series of routines, and listening to gossip. The atmosphere in Shelk changes when a group of runaways, mostly teenagers, put down roots – however temporary they may be – in the hills nearby. Things begin to go missing, houses are broken into, and the safety the residents had become so accustomed to now seems very fragile. A vigilante mentality envelopes the town, with a few residents who reach out trying to help, but who may also have other motivations. Ramsy owns a small bar where the locals tend to congregate, and Stella, Ramsy’s former object of limited affection, reappears one night at Ramsy’s bar after these “gypsies” appear. Ramsy and Stella each have their own story of heartbreak, Ramsy’s daughter has been out of his life for many years, and Stella’s daughter disappeared when she an infant. Ramsy and Stella each befriend one of the wandering teens, which brings about an increasingly suspicious and hostile attitude toward them by the townspeople. Each Vagabond by Name is a wonderful tale of finding your way out of darkness and finding where you belong. Many thanks to University of New Orleans Press, NetGalley and Margo Orlando Littell for providing me with an advanced copy of Each Vagabond by Name.