Stepping in the Write Direction

Rowan, a want to be screenwriter, and Seth, an aspiring novelist, meet at an LA beachfront party. Three weeks later, they’re living together. At one point Seth decides there’s money to be made from YouTube channel content creation, and embarks on honing his craft, which burgeons to what Rowan begins to feel is invasive in their lives, as it morphs into an obsession to boost viewer numbers and constant re-filming to get the perfect video. Eventually they leave LA which becomes too rich for their bank accounts, deciding to return to Ann Arbor where Rowan grew up, and her parents and “married with two kids each” siblings still reside.  As time’s river flows past them, Rowan feels stifled in her screenwriting ambitions, and generates income taking photos of other families’ milestones. She’s surprised and disappointed not to hear back from a studio employed friend where she’s sent a video of a screenplay pitch just as they were leaving California. The YouTube channel is generating ...

I loved Holmes, Marple, and Poe by James Patterson and Brian Sitts, but it wasn’t love at first sight. I had a very hard time getting into the book. I kept falling asleep while reading, and as I progressed further into the narrative, I wasn’t feeling the page turning pull that a Patterson, or any other police procedural/private investigator book worth it’s salt normally has. A little over 100 pages in, and feeling nothing, I went to Amazon to check reviews wondering if others had felt similarly. I did a cursory search, but although I saw a few 3 star reviews, nothing that indicated my level of frustration. I kept on reading, determined to find the spark that would get the ball rolling. That push didn’t occur for me until about page 191 in a 345 page book, but once it started, it was hard to put down, and I was loving it.  When I finished the book, I went back to the reviews again, but this time started with the one star ratings, and there I found those kindred spirits who felt the ...

All of the female protagonists in Mimi Matthews’ novels are intelligent, opinionated, and outspoken, while in this series they live in Victorian England. Her latest book, The Lily of Ludgate Hill, third stand alone book in the Belles of London historic romance series, is no exception. I’ve read all three books in this series. Lady Anne Deveril chose to stay and care for her mother after her father’s premature death. The author writes, “It was enough for now that her mother had acknowledged the value of Anne’s presence. That she’d recognized Anne was here for her, an ally in the fight to come. They may only be women in a world governed by men, but there were two of them. And when women banded together, they could make empires tremble.” The fact Anne’s father’s title was passed to someone outside their immediate family, would soon create issues for them, giving eye opening insights to how inheritance laws were at that time for the titled.  Anne and the man who loves her, “Hart”(Felix...

I’ve never read a book quite like this one, and I’ll never forget it. To say it’s riveting doesn’t do it justice. One Second After by William R. Forstchen is a white knuckle ride through what life in America could be, should the US be hit by several EMP weapons (Electromagnetic Pulse) with no defensive plan in place or prophylactic accommodations to protect the nation from the devastating effects of such an attack, and maintain the integrity of our countrywide electrical grid. Should there be no prepared defense, and such an attack occurs, all power extinguished, no heat requiring electricity, no air conditioning, disabled vehicles, no refrigeration, no cellphones, no communication infrastructure, etc, it would effectively push our current society back into the 1800s. This book depicts a very credible scenario for what life would be like the first year following a countrywide EMP attack. Every American should read this book.  Captain Bill Sanders, U.S. Navy sums it up perfectly in ...

The fourth book in her Chief Inspector Gamache series, A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny was reminiscent  of an Agatha Christie novel. It was one of several books selected by the Goodreads Kindle Book Club Forum for January 2024 reading and discussion. In 2022 I was reading my first Louise Penny book, A World of Curiosities, and it was a DNF for me which is rare. It felt like a lecture series I hadn’t signed up for. The difference between that book and Penny’s earlier book A Rule Against Murder was like night and day. I  absolutely loved this book! I felt like I wanted to highlight every passage. I’m not sure if it’s because it was so beautifully written, or because I’d been starved so long for a rustic isolated setting with a big old inn, a cast of characters, descriptions of bumblebees, and magazine print reverse tattooing itself to a grasping guest’s fingers while reading in a chaise lounge.  The setting was originally a robber baron’s huge old log hunting cab...

The title of this book, The Postcard by Anne Berest, is simplicity that belies the complexities and mysteries of a population of people born during the chaos of any Nazi occupied country during WWII. A postcard is the simplest form of mail to send or receive, and in this case a cryptic message received on one prompts a search spanning generations. For those born during the confusion of the war years, made more inscrutable due to deaths, fears of documentation, and destruction of buildings housing records, all caused by existing wartime conditions, a segment of humanity is left without genealogical connections intact, exacerbated by fears of that period that exact knowledge and record keeping might escalate risks. A daughter begins an odyssey of discovery seeking answers related to a mysterious postcard her mother received from Paris in January 2003, that ultimately leads to a precious gift.   Pile on top of a generation desperately seeking more information about their origins, a sm...

At first glance Bright Lights, Big Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews might look like a typical flavor of the month romance. It was one of three books selected by the Goodreads Kindle Book Club Forum for December, and when checking this 9/26/23 released novel, I found it had been widely read with   4,338 ratings on Amazon and 23,072 ratings on Goodreads. When I first listened to the Audible sample, it grabbed me from the beginning: a family Christmas tree farm had a spring freeze that killed a number of trees, the patriarch  just had a heart attack and his ex wife was caring for him because his current wife dumped him as being a nurse wasn’t compatible with her vision of the future , but the surviving trees needed to be taken up to NYC imminently as they did every year for the big Christmas tree selling season, and this year the future of the farm depended on the income from their trees.   It is up to brother Murphy and his little sister Kelly to take charge of the NYC sales t...