THE STONE BOUDOIR is a wonderful title for a book about Sicily, because Sicily is mountainous, and stony. And the people not only live in stone buildings redolent of history, or even […]
THE STONE BOUDOIR by Theresa Maggio
Ian McEwan is not a bad name for a writer (PAN E POMODOR)
PAN E POMODOR is the delightful tale of how an English couple, Margaret and Ian McEwan, bought a house near Vico in the Gargano region of Puglia, southern Italy, and set about […]
ON PERSEPHONE’S ISLAND: A Sicilian Journal by Mary Taylor Simeti
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 […]
THE FALCON OF PALERMO by Maria Bordihn
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 […]
THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN by Carolina de Robertis
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 […]
MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively
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 […]
THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER by Nina Bawden
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 […]
Paullina Simon’s THE SUMMER GARDEN (BRONZE HORSEMAN #3)
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 […]
Paullina Simon’s TATIANA & ALEXANDER (BRONZE HORSEMAN #2)
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 […]
The intensity of emotion on the page makes this novel transcendent (THE BRONZE HORSEMAN by Paullina Simon)
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 […]
