I was delighted to see that Mary Taylor Simeti had done a travelogue of Sicily, because I remembered her charming tale of Queen Constance and her various travels around Italy that I […]
Maria Bordihn’s THE FALCON OF PALERMO is an ambitious biography of an ambitious character. Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), was known to his contemporaries as Stupor Mundi (the wonder of the world), because […]
This haunting novel begins in 1900, when many people in Tacarembo explained things to themselves by means or folk-tales or legends. It is a novel with three protagonists. The first one, Pajarita […]
I can see why Penelope Lively’s novel MOON TIGER won the Booker Prize in 1987. It is a beautifully written novel, awe-inspiring over its control of multiple points of view and in […]
I loved this book as a girl, another favorite I read over and over again. But what intrigued me so much about it then was Perdita, the witch’s daughter, the shy, neglected […]
After the epic struggles of THE BRONZE HORSEMAN and TATIANA & ALEXANDER, THE SUMMER GARDEN, the third volume in the series, is a comparatively quiet book about how the main characters manage […]
TATIANA AND ALEXANDER is Volume 2 of Paullina Simon’s THE BRONZE HORSEMAN trilogy. Unlike most second novels, this one doesn’t disappoint, even though I had some problems with it that I didn’t […]
What I love about THE BRONZE HORSEMAN by Paullina Simons is the intensity of emotion on the page which lifts a boy-meets-girl story and makes it transcendent. Seventeen-year-old Tatiana Metanova has led […]
One of the joys of listening to a Simon Brett FETHERING mystery is that the characters are so well-drawn. In this episode, we have two women who seemingly could not be further […]
This is another alliterative title (#15) from Simon Brett’s Fethering series. Here we find out two beloved friends, Jude (who has many surnames and whose past is obscure) and her rather pent-up […]
