The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens

This is the story of Mary Gooch, an obese rural Canadian woman who declared that she would commit suicide if she weighed more than 300 pounds. With that figure in the rearview mirror, she continued to gain. The day before her 25th wedding anniversary, her husband disappeared. He left a note saying he had won the lottery and left her some money in the bank. 
Mary then embarked on the journey of her life. 

The Wife's Tale is a beautiful story, compelling told to the point that Mary becomes our hero. I was excited to follow her evolution, cheering for her at every step in the path. I celebrated her achievements and self-realizations. When she encountered adversity, or defeat, she would brush herself off and move forward. This is a story of self-determination at its finest. We should all seek to find ourselves. Mary does in her own way. 


 On the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Jimmy Gooch leaves his morbidly obese, middle-aged wife, Mary. She goes in search of him, and winds up finding herself. There's more to it than that, it's about the journey and the changes the journey brings about.

I loved this book. 

The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory

Hannah Green, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, is forced to flee Spain with her father when the inquisition captures her mother and burns her at the stake. They arrive in Tudor England pretending to be protestents and start up a bookshop and this is where Hannah meets Sir Robert Dudley. She sees an angel behind him and he realises she has the gift of sight and he arranges for her to become young King Edward's court fool as well as spy on Princess Mary. When Edward dies she become Queen Mary's fool. She comes to love her Queen who sets her to spy on Princess Elizabeth. Hannah finds herself walking a dangerous tightrope as political intrigues hatch around her, and the discovery of her own background would be grounds for death.


 An intriguing tapestry of historical events and personages together woven together with the intrigues that were rife in the Tudor court of the Queen who would become known as Bloody Mary.

The Defiant Governess by Andrea Pickens

 By posing as a governess, a beautiful, high-spirited lady manages to escape an arranged marriage...but soon loses her heart to the handsome lord of the manor. Knowing that the most a titled gentleman could offer a mere governess was ruin, she must find a way to be a lady again, before she succumbs to the temptation of his kisses...


A light read that was a little bit different to most Regency's. Enjoyable. 

The Sultan's Heir by Alexandra Sellers

Sheikh Najib blasted into Rosalind's life and staked a sultan's claim on her son!  Her denial of the boys royal lineage was met with deaf ears - and relentless kisses.


Mindless fluff.

Stones From The River by Ursula Hegi

Set in the small (fictional) German town of Burgdorf from 1915 - 1951, this compassionate novel centers on Trudi Montag, a bright, observant, and articulate young woman who is also a zwerg, a dwarf. Born to a mentally ill mother who dies when Trudi is three, Trudi is at first bewildered by her small size, hanging from doorframes to "stretch" her arms and legs, praying that she will become more like other children, and believing that if she is truly good, God will help her.

Though a circus dwarf once comforts her by describing a fantasyland filled with gold and jewels, where everyone is a zwerg, Trudi finds that real life is not so magical. She is physically and emotionally assaulted, and, as a teenager, watches in horror as the Nazis come to power and assault and later "deport" her Jewish friends, who are now considered "different." Trudi's experience of her own "otherness" makes her a sympathetic friend and active supporter of the local Jews, and Hegi evokes great power by connecting the overwhelming Nazi horrors with the life of one small person in one small community. Through Trudi, Burgdorf's citizens come alive--those who befriend her and those who reject her, those who support her efforts to help the Jews and those who don't, and those who pity her and those who are inspired by her.

Throughout the novel, Hegi shows the power of storytelling to influence lives. Trudi works in her father's pay-library, and she is the community's best known storyteller, creating entertaining and lively stories that teach lessons, especially during the war years. But Trudi is no Pollyanna--she also uses her storytelling as a weapon against those who offend her, wreaking her own brand of personal vengeance. As the novel evolves, her childhood companions come and go. Some remain stalwart friends, and some change with the times. She matures emotionally, falls in love, and becomes part of the community's rebuilding after the war.

This is a book that moves you and illuminates a time and place in history with such vivid detail and rich story-telling that you cannot put it down.  

Yearn by Tobsha Learner

 As usual with any collection of short stories I enjoyed some more than others.

My favourites were;

The Alchemy of Coincidence and Fur. 


All were sensual but not usually as erotic as I had expected from the blurb. 

Silent Witness by Leona Karr

Silent witness - Colorada detective Ryan Darnell found the quiet of his small mountain town shattered when a hearing-impaired boy witnessed a brutal murder. Now, with the boy's guardian, Marian Richards, protecting the child became his first priority. Yet sharing long days and even longer nights with the beautiful Marian was a tempation he couldn't resist.


Light fluffy rubbish.

Silent Witness by Leona Karr

Silent witness - Colorada detective Ryan Darnell found the quiet of his small mountain town shattered when a hearing-impaired boy witnessed a brutal murder. Now, with the boy's guardian, Marian Richards, protecting the child became his first priority. Yet sharing long days and even longer nights with the beautiful Marian was a tempation he couldn't resist.


Light fluffy rubbish.

Remembrance by Jude Deveraux

Thirty-nine-year-old bestselling romance author Hayden Lane is obsessed with her latest book hero, Jamie Tavistock. She thinks about him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She writes about him constantly. The problem is that she has concocted the hero without a plot or heroine to go with said character. Her obsession is so bad that her fiance dumps her. Hayden knows she has a problem and goes to therapists to figure out what's wrong. When all fails, she visits a clairvoyant who tells her that Jamie is her soulmate from a past life, and that said past life has left them both cursed for lifetimes to come. Hayden decides to visit a hypnotist to go back in time and meet the object of her obsession, but something goes wrong and she is left in the body of her former life, an Edwardian English woman named Lady de Grey. There she meets Tavey, the love of her life, and discovers what their problem is, and then she is mistakenly sent to where it all begins, to Elizabethan England. Will she be able to erase the curse that plagues them and change the course of history? Will she be able to meet her soulmate in this lifetime? 


Cute idea for a story. I didn't like Tally (the supposed hero), found him to be selfish and immature. 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

During World War II, the Germans occupied Guernsey in the Channel Islands, so close to France that, apparently, you could see cars on the highway on a clear day. The Germans built heavy fortifications against the islanders, built a concentration camp on Guernsey, and Guernsey's children were evacuated to England. 

Juliet Ashton is an author looking for her next great idea, when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, who lives on Guernsey, about Charles Lamb, to whose works we was introduced through the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. The Society came to be in an unusual fashion: one evening after curfew, on their way home, some of its members were stopped by German soldiers, and Elizabeth McKenna had to make something up on the spot. Over time, the members got together whenever they could to talk about what they'd read. That's how Isola, for example, became addicted to Wuthering Heights. 

Juliet lives in a London that was decimated by war; her apartment by the Thames has been lost, as well as all of her books. But her career as a writer is going well, and she has a potential love interest: the handsome and rich Mark. But Juliet's life changes as she receives more and more letters from the Guernsey Islanders, and she decides that she just might have to pay them a visit.


A beautifully written, charming novel written in the form of letters. Some of the stories in the letters are tragic, some funny and all heart warming.

The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux

Three women meet in a summerhouse in Maine for their fortieth birthday where they confront the past, only to secure a future that turns their worlds upside down.

Ellie, a famous writer, is trying to come to terms with a debilitating divorce. She is the instigator of the meeting. Madison is a bedraggled beauty queen never to be found without a cigarette in her mouth, her once glowing and dewy skin now gray and pale. Our third lady is Leslie, a wanna be dancer who trained and dreamed of the future as a young girl giving it all up for a family and station wagon in the suburbs.

Our ladies meet up with a strange woman on Everlasting Street who allows them to return to the past, how and why each of them does, is the stuff that books are made of. The results are cataclysmic to some and minor to others.

A light, fun holiday read. The time travel twist was interesting and imaginative. 

Bite by various

5 stories by various authors.  4 I have read before and 1 was new to me.

My favourite story was Galahad by Angela Knight.  It was the knights of the round table are vampires who live in an alternative dimension and need human witches to feed from.  They come into our world to fight an evil group that is trying to take over the world.  Sounds weird but it worked.  I will be looking for more in this series.

The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

A psychopath is at large; a monster in the grip of some unimaginable delusion compounded of sexual hunger, demonic violence and sinister logic; a boastful killer who sends the police teasing notes signed...the Red Dragon.

"So they call in special agent Will Graham; the one man with the gift to get into the monster's mind; the one man who can *imagine* what the madman feels and can anticipate his next act.



 Definitely suspenseful, even though you find out who it still keeps the suspense going.  The bad guy dies but it was still a bit of a sad ending because the good guy lost his relationship.

The Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards

One of the first books I bought with my Gift card.  The title and cover grabbed me.


When Lucy Jarrett receives a message that her mom has been in an accident --- nothing serious, no need to be here --- of course she returns home. Her boyfriend, Yoshi, says that he will follow in a few days after some business meetings he cannot afford to miss. Their once-idyllic lives in Japan have recently been struck with a series of earthquakes, both the ground-shaking kind and the relationship-doubting kind. Maybe, back in the Lake of Dreams, Lucy can sort out her true feelings. 

Upon returning to her hometown, she quickly falls back into old habits, verbally sparring with her brother, flaring with impatience at her mother, and stirring up an unresolved relationship from deep in her past. Keegan Fall was her first love. Can they rekindle what was lost the night Lucy's father died? 

All the grief, anger and, yes, guilt rush back at Lucy. She cannot resist thinking What if? She never told anyone about the last time she saw her dad before he left to go fishing, mostly because she believes she might have saved his life had she acted differently. Instead, his body was found the next day, in the lake they had lived beside for as long as she can remember. 

Lucy now rattles around her mother's house on the shore of that lake, not quite aimlessly, but not really searching for anything either. In a long-forgotten window box, she discovers some interesting relics. Intrigued, she examines each with curiosity --- curiosity, and maybe a gnawing desire for a diversion. This turns out to be quite a diversion, for it leads her to a chapter in her family's history that no one remembers. And some think it would be best left that way. But Lucy cannot let it go: "I felt it then, the pull of the family history, an invisible gravity, almost irresistible." 

Lucy's mother, brother and uncle seem to have moved on from that tragic night so long ago when Martin Jarrett drowned, while Lucy has been working abroad, jumping from job to job and lover to lover. Is it possible that she will come full circle and end up with Keegan? Her long-distance conversations with Yoshi lately have been impersonal, even cool. If he actually does come to the Lake of Dreams, will they only find an awkwardness borne of the specter of dying love? 

As Lucy's uneasiness about Yoshi grows, Keegan slips into the gap, using all his charms to entice Lucy back. He shows her a beautiful stained glass window that he has restored to its former brilliance. When she sees it, the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle; she instantly recognizes the pattern from a piece of cloth she found in the window box. Her discovery leads to a name, which then leads to a remarkable story, one that will forever change each of their lives. 




An incredibly rich, multi-layered story filled with beautiful imagery. I loved this book.


10/10

Cathouse by Dean Ing

Carroll Locklear was up to his ears in Kzinti. He hadn't planned it that way; what sane human would want to be trapped cheek by furry jowl with a bunch of homicidal bearcats? But when he was taken prisoner, somehow the subject of Locklear's likes and dislikes never came up, and now he finds himself stranded on a planet of prehistoric Kzinti. To survive he must find common cause, if not with the males then with the females of that antique species. 


I enjoyed this fun read. I haven't read any others in the Man-Kzin Wars series and didn't need too. I will be looking for more. 

The Reunion by Sue Walker

'Innes? Innes, it's Isabella. Isabella Velasco...Can you call me as soon as you can?'

"It sounds like a simple message left on an answer machine. But for Innes Haldane, the name Isabella Velasco is enough to make her blood run cold. It's a name from her past - a past she has tried hard to forget.

"For in 1977 a 15-year-old girl Innes spent a year in Edinburgh at The Unit, an experimental home for highly intelligent but dysfunctional teenagers. There her fellow patients had included shy and studious Simon Calder, aggressive Alex Baxendale, child rapist Danny Rintoul and the beautiful Isabella Velasco.

"The year was to have catastrophic repercussions on all concerned. And now, nearly three decades later, Isabella is trying to make contact again.

"But Innes never finds out why. For only days later she reads a newspaper account of Isabella's suicide at a local swimming pool. Innes's shock quickly turns to fear when she hears that Danny too recently committed suicide by drowning.

"Has some dark even, buried deep in 1977, come back to haunt them all, with tragic and terrifying results...?" 

What really happened in the Unit back in 1977? A story told through flashbacks, medical records and newspaper articles. I really enjoyed this complex thriller.

Hidden by Eve Kenin

Tatiana had one goal in life: find Dr. Gavin Ward. Not only had Ward tortured Tatiana as part of his scientific experiments, he also used her DNA to create a particularly nasty strain of the plague. Tatiana’s one clue to finding Ward is his assistant, Tolliver, but so far, the shadowy scientist has eluded her. While searching for Tolliver in the Northern Waste, Tatiana crosses paths with the enigmatic Tristan. A temporary partnership with Tristan seems like a good idea until Tatiana realizes that Tristan is keeping secrets from her. 


 Futuristic action romance.

The growth of Tristan and Anna's relationship was well done. The gradual revelations about their secrets and Tatiana's growing powers add to the tension.

I will be looking for more in this series.

Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich

tephanie Plum, Trenton's favorite bondswoman, is having a career crisis, which gives Janet Evanovich plenty of opportunities to showcase her series heroine in a variety of alternative vocations, from dry cleaner to factory worker. Most of them don't last a full working day, which is good for the reader, since it plunges Stephanie back into the always seedy, often dangerous, and always colorful world of fugitives who'd rather flee than face their day in court. She may be tired of having her life threatened, her cars torched or blown up, and her apartment broken into, but one thing she can say about her job is that it's never boring... and neither is she. Despite her intentions of going straight at a job with a little more security and a bit less excitement, an old client won't let her--he keeps leaving her threatening notes, stalking and scaring her, and making sure she needs the protection of the two men in her life--Joe Morelli, the sexy cop who's been bedding her since high school, and Ranger, the even sexier tough guy who can take down the meanest fugitive around but has a tender spot in his heart for the plucky Ms. Plum. All Evanovich fans' favorite characters people this sprightly caper novel, including Lula, the fast-food-chomping former hooker who's hot to take over Stephanie's job but really belongs in a WWE Takedown; Grandma Mazur, who'd rather go to a wake than a fancy-dress ball; Grandma Bella, the matriarch of the Morelli family whose evil eye frightens even the indomitable Stephanie; and Valerie, Stephanie's sister, who's about to embark on another trip to the altar.


As always, a light, funny read.   Tis series is just fun.

Fangs For The Memories by Kathy Love

Rhys Young is a vampire. Has been for over a two hundred years. On Christmas Eve this gloomy gus walks into a seedy bar and his immortal life will never be the same again. He meets Jane, a truly good heart that speaks to his lost soul. Well, Jane is too good of a girl to be in the dive they're drinking in and when her naive wonder gets her in trouble Rhys saves her, walks her back to her hotel and gets on with life. Sort of. See one of his brothers is less than thrilled with him...to the point that he'd like to see him dead. So he takes matters into his own teeth and sets out to wipe Rhys off the planet. Too bad Jane has made her way back for something she's lost. Now she's in danger as well. 


The relationship development between Jane and Rhys was believable and the love scenes were well done. A light, fun read. 

The Donovan Legacy by Nora Roberts

"Captivated" centers around the first Donovan cousin, Morgana. She is a witch who runs a wiccan type store in Monterey. Nash is a novelist who specializes in horror stories (like Steven King I guess) and he is planning to write a novel about witches, so he comes to meet Morgana since she is infamous in the area for being a witch. At first he doesn't believe her powers are real, but as the two continue getting to know each other and fall in love, he begins to believe.

"Entranced" is about the only male Donovan cousin, Sebastian. He has psychic powers and often uses them to help the police when they are stuck on a case. Mel is a private investigator searching for the kidnapped baby of one of her friends. She doesn't want Sebastian's help, but the distraught mother called him anyways. The two of them go on an intriguing journey to find the lost child, and in the process (of course) fall in love!

"Charmed" is about the final Donovan cousin, Anastasia. Her extraordinary powers specialize in the healing arts. A widowed (I think, I can't remember) father, Boone, moves in next door to her with his young daughter, Jessie. Ana and Jessie get along extremely well and because of this Ana and Boone end up spending a lot of time together and fall in love. The big problem is, Boone doesn't know Anastasia has magical powers which ends up causing a rift between them when he finds out. 

All 3 stories are good, light reading.

Once Upon A Dream

 "In Dreams" by Nora Roberts. In a remote part of Irelandss Avondale Forest, a half of a millennium has past since the curse confined Flynn to a world of dreams. Now Kayleen has entered his castle, his dreams, and hopefully his future.

"The Sorcerer's Daughter" by Jill Gregory. To free her captive father, Artemus the wizard, from Lisha, Willow must retrieve a necklace amidst the Perilous Forest. To protect and aid his cherished daughter, Artemus weaves a spell that sends the wrong man after the Necklace of Nyssa.

"The Enchantment" by Ruth Ryan Langan. Annie of Tyler Real Estate is the agent responsible for the Carrington estate sale in Maine. Ben decides to take one last look at his family home before everything is sold. Neither one expected the enchantment of love.

"The Bridge of Sighs" by Marianne Willman. Claire of San Franciscoss Sterling Galleries flies to Venice to evaluate the Count Ludovicci's Renaissance art collection. However, in Venice, Claire begins seeing visions of a doomed past that forecasts an equally nasty fate for Claire. 


I read the first story, started second and gave up after 2 pages, started the third and gave up after about 20 pages.  Didn't even try the last.  Poorly written, ridiculous trash.

Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich

So your car has been blown up (again).
A local gang has put a contract out on you.
And there's a psycho on the loose.
When did going out for nachos get so complicated?
When you are Stephanie Plum, kick-ass bounty hunter. 

Usual Stephanie Plum, a few laugh out loud moments, she can't decide between Ranger and Morelli and plenty of action.

All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris

Heroine Sookie Stackhouse has grown from being mere barmaid in a small town to being telepathic aide-de-camp to Queen Sophie of Louisiana at a summit of vamps and others in the city of Rhodes. The situs of the convention, the Hotel Gizeh, bears a striking resemblance to the Luxor in Las Vegas which, when combined with the vampire patronized Anubis Airlines, adds a nice undead Egyptian touch.

However, Sophie Anne arrives at the meeting somewhat depleted. Hurricane Katrina has ravaged her queendom, killing many of her subjects and doing untold property damage. Additionally, she is charged with the murder of her husband, and Sookie alone is witness to the facts that can exonerate her at the upcoming trial. Underlings vie for position, rivals plot overthrows, and potential suitors connive for a powerful alliance. In other words, your typical regional professional meeting.


New characters, some I hope appear again, lots of twists and some humour make for a good read. 

A Thousand Bones by P.J. Parrish

Joe Frye is a female deputy for the Leelanau Sheriff's Department in the 1970s when a small number of bone fragments are discovered. The ensuing investigation uncovers a series of brutal murders, and Frye is set to become the killer's next victim.



This book had me hooked until the very end. The characters were true to life and the situations they found themselves in were very plausible. The ending was a bit different to the usual.   The cops left the killer wounded and tied to a tree as he had left his victims.