Tag: book reviews

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South West Series

I recently finished the South West series by Rebecca Paulinyi, which I started back in 2024 when I downloaded the first book for free during a stuff your Kindle event. I liked it enough to buy the second book and then recently decided to take advantage of a three month trial of Kindle Unlimited to finish the series (and read a few other books that I couldn’t get through the library.)

I find these books to be charming, quick reads. We start out in book one by meeting Lee Jones, who impulsively moves to a town in Devon after discovering her husband is cheating on her.  In book three, we meet her sister, Beth Davies, who moves to Devon to shake up her boring life. Lee and Beth continue to be the focus through book six, and then the last two books are about related characters.

The books in order:

  • The Worst Christmas Ever: Christmas in Devon
  • Lawyers & Lattes: Happily Ever After in Devon
  • Feeling the Fireworks: Starting Over in Devon
  • The Best Christmas Ever: A Wedding in Devon
  • Trouble in Tartan: True Love in Devon
  • Summer of Sunshine: Missing Devon
  • Healing the Heartbreak: Moving On in Devon
  • Dancing Till Dawn: First Love in Devon

I am glad I finally got the chance to read the rest of these books. They are fun, feel-good reads.

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The Seven Year Slip

The Seven Year Slip is my first Ashley Poston novel, and I was drawn to it for the magical realism aspect of the story. I have enjoyed several books in this genre over the last couple of years, and this was no exception.

Clementine is an overworked book publicist who has just moved into her deceased aunt’s apartment on New York’s upper east side. Her aunt had claimed that the apartment was magical, and, now that Clementine is living there, it is time for her to experience it for herself. She falls asleep on the couch one night only to awaken seven years in the past. Her aunt is still alive but is abroad for the summer, and the apartment has been sublet to a young man named Iwan.

What follows is an engaging story of love and loss across time. I thoroughly enjoyed the love story and was moved by how Clementine deals with the grief surrounding her aunt’s passing. I thought the supporting characters were very well done and liked the message about following your passion in life. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.

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The Bright Side of Going Dark

The Bright Side of Going Dark by Kelly Harms, which was published in 2020, reads like a modern morality tale. Mia Bell is an influencer who lives her life on a social media site called Pictey. When her fiance breaks up with her just days before their wedding, she fakes the event to satisfy her followers and sponsors. Then her mother confronts her with her reliance on social media, and Mia responds by throwing her phone off a cliff. 

Meanwhile, Paige Miller is a techie loner who notices Mia’s absence, hacks into her Pictey account, and begins ghost posting on her feed. Paige is dealing with her own issues, including job stress and her sister Jessica’s mental health crisis, but she convinces herself this will be a good thing somehow. Of course, it all comes to a head when Mia finds out what Paige has been doing.

This was a fun read, although slightly heavy-handed in its message. My favorite part was seeing how Mia adjusted to being offline and made connections in real life.

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Queer & Christian

TL;DR

I really appreciated Brandan Robertson’s book Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table. He does discuss the clobber passages that have been used by many in the church to condemn queer people, but he also goes well beyond these to talk about the place of queerness in our theology and practice of Christianity. 

He bookends the theological discussions with his personal testimony of becoming a Christian and experiencing a lot of harm from the church until he got to a place of peace regarding his identity and his faith and a Q&A where he answers commonly asked questions related to queerness and the church.

Further Thoughts

In chapter 1, Robertson shares a usage of the word queer that means “to disrupt arbitrary norms, making space for diverse and often marginalized existing and perspectives to flourish.”  He suggests that, based on that definition, the church needs queering in many ways. In addition to the full inclusion and acceptance of LGBTQ people, this idea also makes me think of how women are only tolerated at conservative churches if they toe the line of submission and how black and brown people are welcomed in those same spaces only to the extent that they make themselves fit in with the predominantly white culture.

Part 1 of the book continues with his personal story – from feeling different even as a child to becoming a Christian as a teenager and subsequently learning that the church that seemed to welcome him actually had a lot of conditions on their love, to going to Bible college and trying to pray the gay away, to deconstructing a lot of what he believed about religion and finding a faith community that embraced him. It is a powerful testimony about the harm that has been done to many queer individuals.

In Part 2, he posits that the Bible’s authority does not come from within its pages, but from “within the communities that hold it as sacred and interpret it.” After discussing the “clobber passages” that are traditionally thrown at LGBTQ people, he brings up an idea that was new to me related to Acts 10-11. These chapters share how Peter was called to open his mind to accept that Gentiles could become Christians just like the Jewish people who believed in Jesus. When he shared the experience with the leaders of the church, they all changed their minds as well and began accepting Gentiles into the faith. This inclusion of people who were formerly outsiders is a step towards fulfilling God’s desire that all people would be saved and serves as an example to all of us when unexpected people want to join our community and faith.

Part 3 of the book is essentially a look at several people and relationships from the Bible who exhibit some form of queerness. I had heard of some of these before, while others were new to me. I’m not completely sure I agree with his take on all of them, but I do find his explanation of how these differ from the norms of the day to be worthy of further exploration on my part.

In Part 4, Robertson answers several commonly asked questions, and I found this practical application of his ideas to be so interesting and useful. He encourages people to move beyond the idea that we can accept queer people but still maintain all of our other traditional beliefs and instead to examine every area of our theology and practice.

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The Library

The Library is the first book I have read by Bella Osborne, a UK writer who has been publishing mostly romcoms since 2015. This book is one of her uplifting bookclub reads, and I’m sure the library setting was what got it on my radar. The main characters are Tom, a sixteen-year old boy who feels invisible, and Maggie, a seventy-two year old woman who has been on her own for the last ten years.

Tom and Maggie meet at the village library and become friends as they join forces to help save the library from being closed by the council. It is definitely a feel-good story with a heavy emphasis on books, so right up my alley.

I could identify with both characters in different ways. I can relate to Tom feeling invisible and finding solace in reading, and I can relate to Maggie having a good life but still finding something missing. For instance, Maggie finds that in her situation, the thing she misses most of all is the hugs.

“It was a peculiar quirk of polite modern society that without a partner or offspring in your life you were denied that one key comfort humans require – the need for physical contact. An embrace can be on many different levels but the basic sensation of emotional and physical warmth given freely by another is most noticeable when it is no longer there.”

I also appreciated the focus on books and reading being part of one’s life. I loved how Tom grew in his confidence with books and the library until he was recommending books to others, and these words from Maggie really resonate with me:

“Books are such an underrated essential. Every book is a key that unlocks another world, leads us down the path of a different life and offers the chance to explore an unexpected adventure. Every one is a gift of either knowledge, entertainment or pure escapism and goodness knows we all need that from time to time.”

All in all, this was a lovely story and an enjoyable read.

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Short Story Reviews November 2025

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi

⭐⭐⭐/5

This short story is the first of The Time Traveler’s Passport, six Amazon Original stories that are free to read with Kindle Unlimited. I found this one quite interesting with a good twist at the end. Scalzi has an intriguing take on how time travel could work and what part it would play in society.

The Toy Car by Rose Tremain

⭐⭐/5

This is a coming-of-age story about a young man from Greece who visits his mother’s home country of England at her insistence so that he can see what else is out there before he follows in his father’s footsteps as the owner of a small taxi company. I didn’t really connect with the characters, so this was a miss for me.

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Brigands & Breadknives

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree

I love the cozy fantasy world Travis Baldree has created in the Legends & Lattes series. This is considered Book 2 in the series, although it is actually the third book published. First we had Legends & Lattes, which was Book 1, and then we had Bookshops & Bonedust, which was Book 0. The settings were a coffee shop and bookshop, respectively.

This book starts out with Fern, the bookseller from Book 0, moving to Thune, where Viv from Book 1 has her coffee shop, to open a new bookshop. Things quickly take a turn as Fern finds herself far from home after a night of drinking and desperation. She ends up on an adventure with an elven warrior and a chaotic goblin captive.

I was surprised at first by the turn this book took–away from the cozy fantasy shop setting and towards an action-filled adventure plotline. It felt a lot like some of the D&D campaigns I have been a part of. That’s not a bad thing, just different and unexpected after the other two books. It had some good fights and some fun, quirky elements. 

The parts I most enjoyed were seeing the evolving relationships between the characters and following Fern’s internal journey through her writing of letters to Viv back in Thune. I am hoping there will be more books in the series and that they will be more like the first two that were written.

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Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir – written by Alba Donati and translated by Elena Pala

After working in Italian publishing for many years and being a poet herself, Alba Donati returned to her very small hometown of Lucignana to open a tiny bookshop called Libreria Sopra la Penna. The bookshop opened in December of 2019, and the memoir takes the form of a diary that she kept from January to June of 2021. Each day’s entry ends with a list of the books that were ordered from the shop that day, and it was fascinating to see what people were getting and which books showed up multiple times.

Throughout the memoir, we learn a lot about life in a small village of only 180 people, where everybody knows your business almost before you do. Donati also shares a lot of her childhood, her family history, and how she handles the relationships with her elderly parents. And, of course, there are many stories about books and authors and the many readers she encounters.

As Donati puts it, “People want stories. It doesn’t matter who wrote them; they need stories to take their mind off things, stories to identify with or to take them elsewhere. Stories that won’t hurt, that will heal a wound, restore trust, instill beauty in their hearts.”

I love that quote, and I found the entire book very engaging. I enjoyed hearing Donati’s thoughts on literature, especially on the importance of championing women authors. I found myself imagining living in a small village and getting to spend my days around so many books, which sounds like heaven.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I have enjoyed several memoirs over the years. I think I need to add some more of them into my rotation.

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What you are looking for is in the library

What you are looking for is in the library, written by Michiko Aoyama and translated by Alison Watts

I love the idea that a wise librarian could point you in a direction you had not thought of, which would turn out to be the perfect answer to what you were struggling with. In this book, we meet five different people, each of whom is unhappy with their life in some way:

  • Tomoka, 21 womenswear sales assistant
  • Ryo, 35, accounts department of a furniture manufacturer
  • Natsumi, 40, former magazine editor
  • Hiroya, 30, NEET (not in employment, education or training)
  • Masao, 65, retired

Somehow, each of them ends up at the community library and meets Sayuri Komachi, a librarian who asks them what they are looking for and gives them a list of books that includes one unrelated book as well as a bonus gift, a small felted object. The seemingly unrelated book ends up leading them to the answer they need to find happiness in their lives.

One thing that I found jarring was the reaction each of the characters had to the librarian when they first saw her. She is a large woman, and the descriptions of her appearance are quite derogatory. They each assume that she is an angry, unapproachable person and are surprised when she is friendly and helpful.

Putting that aside, I found the conclusions that each person reached to be very satisfying and thought-provoking. I am glad that I read this book.

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The Lost Bookshop

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods – ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

I enjoyed The Lost Bookshop so much. I loved immersing myself in the world Woods created in this story.

The highlights:

✅I have really come to enjoy magical realism as I have read more of it, and it was very well done in this book. 

✅I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to follow along with the two timelines and the different points of view. 

✅The two women did encounter some difficult situations in their lives that were hard to read about, but they was handled well.

✅The emphasis on books was so lovely, especially the rare book dealing aspect.

✅I love Henry, the MMC.