In This Troubled Ground, retired Lt. Col. Les Carroll offers a deeply authentic tale of war’s aftermath, following an Air Force officer and a grieving mother through loss, hope, and the search for meaning.
BookTribJuly 9, 2025
The Colony Club is the epitome of what historical fiction should be, as the genre all too often misses the mark, riddled with anachronisms or carelessly blatant errors. Author Shelley Noble deftly balances clearly identified actual people, places and events with plausible vibrant fictional characters portrayed in a lively story…
Linda HitchcockNovember 7, 2024
Books & Looks: Real Books for Real Readers was started as a literary podcast to supplement Blaine Desantis’ website, ViewsOnBooks.com, and expand into audio and video interviews with authors. With Books & Looks, Blaine’s goal is to focus on real books that real people will read. At least half of the books he…
Blaine DesantisOctober 2, 2024
In the summer of 2019, I met with my then-editor at Kensington Books, and she mentioned Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard 'Kip' Rhinelander and their headline news story from the 1920s. It was a passing comment that I took to heart because I’d never heard of Alice or Kip and…
Denny S. BryceJuly 23, 2024
“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice In the desolate landscapes of the Oklahoma Panhandle, Alex Woodard’s Ordinary Soil (Greenleaf Book Group Press) is a powerful and haunting story that delves into themes of generational trauma, family, love, global…
Dawn IusNovember 14, 2023
A grandmother’s album of photographs and postcards reveals the Belle Époque in Berlin — a time of unrivaled promise, peace, and prosperity — through the eyes of a young Prussian Jewish woman, as told by her grandson Stephan R. Frenkel in Clara’s Secret (LAEV). In 2016, Frenkel discovered an album…
Peggy KurkowskiSeptember 7, 2023
“A writer at the height of her powers.” That’s how Oprah.com described Melissa Pritchard, whose latest work, Flight of the Wild Swan, is a majestic novel about Florence Nightingale, whose courage, self-confidence and resilience transformed nursing and the role of women in medicine. Sweeping yet intimate, Flight of the Wild…
BookTribMarch 12, 2024
Mrs. Lowe-Porter (Jackleg Press) is a captivating biographical novel by award-winning author Jo Salas that blurs the lines between rather bare bones known historical facts and a fictional story adding great emotional depth with richly imagined innermost thoughts and feelings of its subject. This book effectively projects American author and translator…
Linda HitchcockFebruary 26, 2024
Much like the dynamic and accomplished women in The First Ladies, Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray have forged an incredible friendship and partnership. Following the great success of The Personal Librarian, they have released their second collaboration, The First Ladies. Please find the video recording of the…
Jennifer BlankfeinOctober 4, 2023
The Seamstress of Sardinia (Harper Perennial) is a lovely dream of a book, soothing, pleasant and welcome in a complicated world often filled with obligations and stress. It is not an inconsequential novel. It chronicles the emancipation and independence of a modest peasant girl into a resilient, self-educated young woman…
Linda HitchcockDecember 22, 2022
"Quinn manages to give her readers something that’s both engaging because it’s well written and exciting because it’s grounded in truth." —∞— Amid WWII, can Lady Death, a quiet bookworm turned lethal sniper, hit her mark? Based on an incredible true story, Kate Quinn’s latest novel, The Diamond Eye (William…
Lydia LefevreApril 18, 2022
Suanne Laqueur’s ambitious historical fiction novel, A Small Hotel, begins with a “Once upon a time” innocence, a sweet simplicity that belies the labyrinthine journey she’s about to take her readers on. It’s a romance; a travelogue; an introduction to Swedish mythology, language and good luck charms. The story begins…
Sherri DaleyMarch 25, 2022
In This Booker Prize Finalist, a Somali Immigrant Endures the Biased Justice System of 1950s Cardiff
Author Nadifa Mohamed explores the topic of wrongful incarceration and a corrupt justice system in her new release, The Fortune Men (Knopf). The immersive detail and timeliness of this narrative are among the reasons that the book was selected as a finalist for this year’s prestigious Booker Prize. The Fortune…
Michael FerryDecember 23, 2021
Emily's House (Berkley) is Amy Belding Brown's long-awaited novel about one of America's greatest poets, Emily Dickinson, and her confidante, the Irish maid responsible for saving Dickinson's work from certain destruction, albeit against the poet's expressed wishes. Through the voice of Margaret Maher, the headstrong 27-year-old Irish immigrant who served…
Susan BaileyAugust 3, 2021
Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, first published in 1947, is a universal classic and perhaps the most powerful, important and tragic account of the Nazi occupation of Holland in the early 1940s. It has sold 30 million copies in 67 languages. Some 1.3 million people visit…
Jim AlkonApril 14, 2021