I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “‘We can’t spend our lives wishing…If we are small, then so are our wishes,’” (Angstman 108). Out Front the Following Sea follows sixteen-year-old Ruth Miner, a headstrong young woman who reads and speaks of things a woman in 1698 shouldn’t know about. …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. ‘It’s not fair to blame us for their cruelty. It’s inherent in their design. We had no hand in that,” (Amouzegar 97). The Hubris of an Empty Hand follows a cast of interconnected characters who unknowingly receive divine gifts from the …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. I’ve never read a collection of flash fiction before. In general I enjoy flash fiction, I love seeing how much authors can pack into a story in as few words and pages as possible and I think Fliss did an amazing …
“Everything that happens in this book is true, by which I mean that it all really happened, the poison and the poems, the deadly cactus and the hypnotic musician, the chicken and the egg and the fatal finale, a phrase which here means there is death at the end of the story,” (Snicket 2). After …
“I was made for him,” (Valente 5). Sophia lives a perfect life in Arcadia Gardens. She has the perfect husband who she was made for, something she can so easily feel in her bones. But her husband has an important job and is away from her so often, she misses him so much. But he …
CW: suicide, derogatory epithets, sports rape, peer pressure, strong language, racism, xenophobia, social injustice, war trauma, disability, toxic masculinity. I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. Wow does River Weather ever pack a punch! This collection of short stories is set in Northern Virginia set mostly in the …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. Can one short story make or break a book? If the book in question is What If We Were Somewhere Else then my answer would be yes, the guilty story being “The Human,” but we’ll get to that later. But if I’m …
CW: Sexual assault. I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “Love…was sometimes a decision you made, a promise to yourself to see only the best in a person, in spite of what else might be lurking,” (Schweighardt 46). Estela Hopper, the illegitimate child of Jack Hopper, has been …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “I loved watching the mist dissipate to reveal the world more with every sunrise. I loved seeing the sky and the river shift from black to gold. I loved the sight of the assai palms, standing along the river bank like …
Hello everyone, I’m very happy to welcome Joan Schweighardt to the blog today! Joan is the author of nine novels which include two children’s books, two memoirs, and various magazine articles and is a winner of the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” award, ForeWord Magazine’s “Best Fiction of the Year,” and a Borders …
Sarah O'Connor 