Book Reviews
We love reading!
Here are some of the books we've recently enjoyed.
The List of Last Chances
By Christina Myers
Do you love stories about life on the road? Does armchair travelling inspire you?
Then consider “The List of Last Chances” by Christina Myers. This charming book follows 38-year-old Ruthie and 70-something Kay on a cross-Canada road trip from PEI to Vancouver.
Ruthie expects this to be a direct, focused journey, until Kay reveals her list of must-visit destinations on the 6,000 km journey west.
This delightful book is a love letter to travel, Canadian destinations, and the people we get to know along the way — including ourselves.
The Door-to-Door Bookstore
By Carsten Henn
Clearly we have a thing for books about books and the impact they can have on us. So when we saw this book on the shelf, we knew it was coming home with us.
“It has been said that books find their own readers — but sometimes they need someone to show them the way.” And so begins this charming novel, set in a small town in Southern Germany.
The Door-to-Door Bookstore is a quiet novel about a quiet man’s life — until a precocious nine-year-old girl appears.
This delightful book whispers, rather than shouts, inviting those who believe in the transformative power of books to come along for the journey.
The Guncle and The Guncle Abroad
By Steven Rowley
And then there were two.
How does an author write the sequel to a perfectly self-contained book?
The Guncle Abroad starts up five years after The Guncle arrived in our lives and our hearts. The same characters have all grown up or at least grown older, and are now converging on a lakeside destination in Italy. What could possibly go wrong?
If you loved The Guncle, see where their passports take them in The Guncle Abroad.
The Perfect Family
by Robyn Harding
We all know them — those people who make life appear effortless. That’s the Adler family. It seems like their lives are perfect. Until they aren’t.
Thrillers are meant to keep you turning the page. They’re meant to keep you guessing. But The Perfect Family with its multiple points of view did something else for me, it kept me caring about the characters. A masterful blend of empathy and mystery, Robyn Harding’s novel is one of my favorites.
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
By Abbi Waxman
Another book about books. I sense a theme.
In The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, the title character, Nina, is perfectly content with planning each day of her 29-year-old existence. Her life comprises working at a bookstore, managing her trivia team and her cat.
Masterful at daily schedules (which are peppered between the book’s chapters) Nina has everything figured out, thank you very much. Until she doesn’t.
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is a delightful rom-com with a book focus. The full review is here.
Two Books by Helene Hanff
The power of books lies not just in their ability to entertain and inform, but in how they make us consider or reconsider the world.
84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff is a collection of letters between Helene, a book-loving New Yorker, and Frank Doel, the manager of Marks & Co, a specialty bookstore in London located at 84, Charing Cross Road. The second title, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street consists of diary entries tracing the impact of the first book’s publication on the life of the author.
These two books are a delightful, inseparable pair. The full review is here.
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
by Katarina Bivald