Fairy Tales and Nightmares: Nine Fairy Tale Retellings by A.F. Stewart My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was an outstanding dark take on classic fairy tales! I ate it right up and enjoyed every last second of it. AF Stewart has a knack for leaving enough of the fairy tales intact to tell what […]
A Gracious Neighbor by Chris Cander My rating: 4 of 5 stars The style and voice of this novel are very well done. We’ve got an excellent Deep POV here—something enjoyable for readers and a great learning tool for authors to study. We have an unusual form of unreliable narrator who considers herself, for example, […]
Chronicles of the Undead by A.F. StewartMy rating: 5 of 5 stars Told wholly via journal entries, Chronicles of the Undead takes us through three people’s journals, all from the same family. Their perspectives on the same subjects are different, but the obsession with vampires is insidious. Stewart manages to keep the dark feel throughout […]
Broken Faith: Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults by Mitch Weiss My rating: 5 of 5 stars An absolutely incredible and necessary expose on one of the worst church cults ever, author Mitch Weiss did such thorough research to bring Word of Faith Fellowship’s abuse and illegal activities to […]
Family Money by Chad ZunkerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars This suspense book lacked real suspense a lot of the time. The overwhelming source of tension throughout most of it was whether Alex’s wife would find out he’s lying to her since that’s something she can’t abide. That’s not enough for a suspense/thriller book. That’s […]
Myst: The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you’ve ever enjoyed the Myst games, you will appreciate this book, which tells the background of how the Myst island came to be. The authors go very in-depth as to how world writing works, the mistakes that can be made, […]
Mary Astor’s Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sorel does a wonderful job of bringing lots of Mary Astor’s life that most people won’t know about to the forefront and building up why she became the woman became—multiple marriages to deadbeat men, an […]
A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon My rating: 5 of 5 stars What a journey! Sheldon captures quite a lot of what I know to be true in Hollywood based on the many biographies and autobiographies of stars I’ve read. Everything is believable, and he brings us so close to the characters, all […]
Sea Glass by Anita Shreve My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book turned out to be so much better than I had thought when I first started it. It starts with quite a lot of description, which turned me off immediately; too much description in the beginning leaves me bored since there’s not enough […]
Silent Night by J.E. Taylor My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a short, quick read with every inch of it filled with Christmas. I enjoyed all the many holiday references the author managed to squeeze in in clever ways. I didn’t expect an urban fantasy book, even though it’s centered around Christmas, to […]