By Shannon Garvey
** Publication Date 12 May 2026 **
​4 stars




I’ve always held fantasies of running away to a summer island. Lounging on the beach reading. Working odd jobs to get by. Living in a small cottage. Or the mountains. It’s always had this idyllic ring to it. Reality is never quite as nice (unless you have a pile of cash stashed in a shoebox!)


Maggie and Joel were blessed with one child, Ruth. Ruth was an average child, with a gift for writing. And then her mom got sick. Nothing a child ever wants to hear. Cancer. Ruth mostly took care of Maggie at this time, even though Ruth was still just a teenager. When the end comes for Maggie, Ruth is bereft. She doesn’t want to go to her job. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She just wants to wallow in her sadness.


So Joel sends her off to live with a friend of Maggie’s. Off to Block Island where Diana lives and works in the summertime. When Ruth shows up, broken, on Diana’s doorstep, Diana can do nothing else but take her in. 


Over five summers Diana nurtures Ruth’s creative side. Teaching her to take photographs. Buying her journals to keep up her writing. Including Ruth as though she were Diana’s own daughter. Every summer Diana’s nephew Charlie comes to the island for a vacation. The two young people bond and share and develop a relationship somewhere between siblings and lovers. 


After five years, Ruth heads out on her own, working on the island in the summers, and in Maine in the winters. Rarely stopping at her home to see her father. Burying the pain and guilt down as deep as she can. Then she gets a call from Charlie that Diana is in the hospital dying. Now Ruth is completely broken. 


Back to the island she goes, but what is her place there now without Diana? She never did take Diana’s well meaning advice or connections seriously about moving on with her life. Now what. Ruth has this sumner to try to figure it out. 


I’m sure there are so many women who identify with Ruth’s inability to figure out what to do next after a tragedy strikes. Those fears in the back of your mind that you’re not worthy, or talented, or capable. Easier to just slog along the way you are than take a risk at a future. 


I loved this book. So very much. There aren’t pretty little packages tied up with bows at the end. But there is some closure and hopefuiness.


Definitely read this one.

By Imani Thompson
** Publication Date 5 May 2026 **
3.5 stars 




I’ve always been fascinated by serial killings. The motives, the reasoning, the psychopathy. Those of us who love shows like Criminal Minds or Dateline, I think, are curious as to what it takes to be that person. 


In Honey, Yrsa is a very bright PhD student in Cambridge. Her dissertation is based on Afropessimism, which in itself sounds like a fairly depressing topic. There is much violence and killing in the works she is studying for her PhD. As a doctoral student she teaches undergrads, which she finds very unsatisfying. 


When her close friend Nina is jilted by her married lover, Yrsa finds an opportunity to get back at him for his abhorrent behavior. Just a little nudge of a bee in his direction. Suddenly the man is in anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. Yrsa waits until it’s just gone a bit too far to summon help. So begins her fascination with murder, or in her mind, justified killing.


On the outside Yrsa seems like any other mid-twenties young woman. Trying to find love. Trying to finish her studies. Just getting by. She has amazing friends. Men seem to adore her. But as her unexpected desire to kill grows stronger, she loses a sense of where she was and now finds herself obsessed with men who misbehave. 


I found this novel interesting. To the reader, Yrsa is definitely off. There is nothing normal about her behavior, even stretching back into her younger life. As the book continues, her behavior is in so many ways normal, but also so deviant. Her ability to basically split herself into two completely different women is wild. The writing is fabulous to convey the sense of Yrsa being the ‘normal’ woman and Yrsa the ‘killer.’ 


Incredible writing, very well contrived, but the ending just left me wondering, WHAT? 

By Tom Perrotta
** Publication Date 28 April 2026 **
​4 stars




The early teen years can be fraught with emotions and hormones. Your friends from grade school suddenly become your not friends or even enemies in middle school. You start noticing people in a desirable way. You try ti find yourself and figure out who you are.


For Jimmy, the summer before high school started out in a normal way. Finishing up little league. Hanging out with friends. Although his mom was very sick - cancer. Jimmy is at a little league championship game when it happens. His mother is whisked off to the hospital where she dies because her heart gives out. Jimmy can’t understand this. But it will change his life forever.


At the funeral, Jimmy starts to hear his mom’s voice. He wanders out of the building and runs into a older kid in a Vega. Eddie. Jimmy will become friends with Eddie and spend a lot of time hanging out with him. Trying new things. After all, Jimmy has no idea what his life is anymore. His sister is heading off to college in the fall. His father works extra hours and hangs out at the firehouse. Jimmy is left alone to figure out his summer, his friends, his future.


This is the summer that will make a lifelong impression on Jimmy and his childhood in Creamwood, NJ. Life will never be the same after this summer. 


Somewhat of a coming of age novel, it is a fairly tragic story about being a young teen and trying to understand how you fit into this world. Especially without your mom. Jimmy goes on to do well in life, but when he is summoned back to his childhood community, all the memories of that summer resurface, for good and bad. Beautifully written and quite compelling, this is a messy time in a young boy’s life. It’s a messy time without tragedy befalling your family.


I enjoyed it. Truly interesting.

By kai alonté
** Publication Date 21 April 2026 **
​4 stars




Certain stories are like a warm blanket. They wrap you up comfortably. Some stories are more like hiking through brambles. They tug at you and make you squirm. This novel has a bit of both, but it definitely more like the latter.


Dzifa has two names. Dzifa, which is supposedly her Ghanian name, her once home. Mercy is her Christian name. The one that makes people different from her more at ease. However, she prefers Dzifa.


She grew up mostly in Oakland in a big house with her mother, older sister Esther, but never her father. Though married, her parents are married in name and finances only. Her father is constantly absent. Esther mostly raises Dzifa. Their mother, more obsessed with appearances than care, is emotionally absent. Esther does her best to make sure Dzifa has what she needs. But when Esther leaves for college, it becomes too much. Dzifa is sent off to boarding school.


Eventually Dzifa lands at Elmwood college where she befriends Tatiana. Beautiful Tatiana, so full of self-love and confidence, the utter opposite of Dzifa. Dzifa always considers Tatiana her sister, her best friend. They remain close while living in New York City. They stay in touch when Dzifa escapes back to Oakland and Tatiana to her home in Boston. And when tragedy befalls Tatiana, Dzifa never thinks twice before boarding a plane to Boston to be with Tatiana.


But through it all, Dzifa is never really sure of her footing or her place in the world. She just seems to drift from one place to another, one job to another, never really living. At some point Dzifa will need to find her happiness, and maybe all this drifting is what finally brings her to make choices that will be in Dzifa’s best interest, not anyone else’s.


What a beautifully written piece of literature this was. While Dzifa is most definitely the primary character of the novel, Tatiana’s presence is never far from mind. Almost as though every thought Dzifa has is countered by Tatiana’s response to it. It is amazing to see Dzifa flounder through her younger years and start to finally come to terms with life a bit later. The journey is clearly one of self-discovery and growth, a journey we hopefully all make through young adulthood.


Not an easy novel, definitely rocky and tumultuous, but ultimately so satisfying. 

By Moorea Corrigan
** Publication Date 21 April 2026 **
5 stars




A little bit of fantasy and the fairy world brings us a wonderful story about a mortal woman the the Faerie man she enlists to help her heal her ancestral home.


Mouse is a nurse. She tended to those torn by the war, one of them being her brother Roger. Mouse is the child of an Irish gardener and an English Lady. Lady Dewhurst would have been her mother, had she lived. Her father was brought to the family home of Thistlemarsh, where Mouse and her brother would be raised alongside their cousin Bertie. 


Only Bertie’s father was a wicked man. Never once treating his sister’s children as anything close to his own, and expecting their father, his own brother-in-law, to tend to the gardens. Mouse grew up learning from her father. Roger and Bertie attended Eton, only Roger left after a scuffle with Bertie’s cousin Carlyle.


Eventually the war took Bertie and most of Roger’s mind. Lord Dewhurst passed, and Mouse was left the heir to Thistlemarsh, with strings attached. Those strings would leave the whole estate and inheritance to Carlyle unless Mouse could meet the expectations and demands of the will. 


In comes Thornwood to try to help Mouse right the wrongs, or so she thinks. Taken in by his beauty and magic, Mouse agrees to terms that might not save her after all.


What a wonderful story of Faeries in the modern world. The legends of the Faerie King and his place in rural England is truly a work of magic. There is simply nothing better than escaping into this make-believe world. Mouse is a both a heroine and a train-wreck in alternating chapters. Her strength and will and tenderness are perfect in every way. Thornwood is exactly what you’d expect a faerie to be, part wicked trickery and part beautiful all in one. The relationship between he and Mouse has chemistry from their first pages together.


There are books that stay with you long after you have closed them. Thistlemarsh will definitely take that spot.