Reviews
Thoughts on books
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Between Two Fires
The Black Death ravages France, leaving fields and rivers choked with unburied dead. Thomas, a disgraced knight, roams the land with a band of thieves when they encounter an orphaned girl in a dying village. No ordinary child, this girl sees angels and talks to the dead. She tells Thomas that Lucifer and the fallen angels have risen in a new war on Heaven, that the kingdoms of men have fallen behind the lines of battle, and that he must now shepherd her on a holy quest to tip the scales in favor of good. Between Two Fires invites you on a journey of a violent man’s first, uncertain steps…
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The Magic of Chamomile Cottage
A storyteller in search of a story. A healer in need of hope. A town looking for a fresh start. And the magic that binds them together. Popular storyteller Sunny Callaway is known for writing captivating human-interest stories, but lately she’s having trouble writing anything after a devastating diagnosis and a painful breakup. When a surprise discovery leads her to a small town fighting for survival after the closing of its tea factory, she finds family she hadn’t known and a story that will change her life forever. Tea shop owner Nova Frances Clark has an old soul, a healer’s heart, and a big secret. Although her special chamomile tea…
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The Astral Library
Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books. But before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect.
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The Calamity Club
From best-selling author of The Help comes a big-hearted novel about a group of unbreakable women fighting for what's rightfully theirs.
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If Books Could Kill
When Roxie makes a tongue-in-cheek wish to live out the plot of her favorite author's next novel, she has romance in mind -- namely, the sweet, safe, swoon-worthy storylines Anna Matthews is known for. It should be a dream come true when her wish is granted by a mysterious busker, and she finds herself swept into a fairytale first date with a dashing stranger who seems destined to take her breath away. Except for one little hiccup: that dashing stranger tries to take her breath away. Literally. With a knife. The thing is, Roxie may be the new Anna Matthews protagonist -- but this time, Anna is writing a…
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Wild Dark Shore
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed…
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Demon Copperhead
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
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The Blackthorn Women
For fans of Practical Magic, a terrible family curse threatens four generations of women in a spellbinding novel of haunting secrets, magic, and healing.
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Interlocking Crochet: 50 Reversible Stitch Patterns and Five Projects for the Modern Crocheter
This practical guide introduces you to the world of interlocking crochet, a method that uses just two familiar stitches (double crochet and chain stitch) to create intricate colorwork with surprising ease. By interlocking two layers of mesh as you work, you’ll produce fabrics that are reversible by design: some featuring matching motifs on both sides, others revealing a completely different pattern when flipped over.
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The Overstory
A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review). The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world…
