The past few weeks have brought a lot of reading time with cold temperatures and some rainy days perfect for escaping into a story. Time for a good book chat! Amazon links provided for those who want more information. Thank you for using my links when you can. They help to provide a small commission to pay for the costs of writing and publishing this blog.

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights by Kitty Zeldis – At its heart, this is a story of family, both of blood and choice. Set in the early 1920s, with flashbacks to earlier decades, three women’s lives intersect. Bea is working to build a dressmaking business with a younger woman, Alice, who is like a daughter to her, although she has never expressed that. Catherine comes into the shop to buy a dress, and sets in motion the revelation of a secret. As Alice becomes envious of the relationship she doesn’t understand, she makes a decision to run away. The story wraps around and comes full circle by the predictable ending, but is enjoyable from a standpoint of exploring women’s relationships. The dressmaking background wasn’t much of the story, and that was a bit disappointing. Overall, a good book. Available in print, Audible and on Kindle.

The Collector of Burned Books by Roseanna M. White – Rarely do I give a book 5 stars, but this is one of them. It is historical fiction at its best. The story is set in 1940 Paris at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. The Library of Burned Books was a real place in Paris, opening in 1934, with books by German writers who dissented against Hitler. The books were burned in Germany, but preserved in Paris in this place. At the beginning of the occupation of France, the library was closed by the Nazi government but the books were not destroyed. In the story, a woman who was using the library to aid the resistance meets the German officer assigned to catalogue it. The book has a foreboding atmosphere, bringing the reader into a time where every word and action is watched, where rationing of food is a daily struggle, and where a person’s associations could get them sent to the prison camps. But the German officer is not what he seems, and the revelation of his secret will put himself, her and her friends in danger. The book is very compelling in its story and prose, very difficult to put down and even more so knowing it is based in true events. I flew through the pages in just a few days, and now cannot wait to read more by this author. Run to your local library and reserve it! Or get a copy for your permanent shelf. Like me you may want to re-read this one again. Available in print, Audible and on Kindle.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins – A suspenseful novel full of secrets and lies, with an open ending that some may find disturbing. The basic story involves a famous reclusive artist, a shocking discovery in one of her works after her death, and the solitary woman who inherited the artists island home. The home is only accessible over a causeway 12 hours a day, at the two low tides, and holds its secrets well, until a man comes calling to ask too many questions. It is a page-turning, Hitchcock-esque novel, creepy and may leave you thinking about it for days. Three stars, down graded because I didn’t like the open ending, and the denouement may be disturbing. Available in print, Audible and on Kindle.

Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite Clayton – A fictionalized novel based on the reality of 1950s Hollywood with casting couches, back alley abortions, unwanted pregnancy, studio ‘fixers’ and the terrible reality of McCarthyism blacklisted actors, writers and directors. The second timeline deals with the Me Too movement. The novel never captured my interest with its slow moving plot although these are important issues that shouldn’t be tolerated. But, I just didn’t want to read about these things in my leisure reading time. Wall-banged around page 130 due to too much sexual content. Available in print, Audible and on Kindle.

The Earth’s Children Series by Jean Auel – I have all six of these novels in hardback and will re-read them from time to time. I discovered the series in the mid-1980s. I bought both the first book, Clan of the Cave Bear, and the second one, Valley of Horses, at a used bookstore, and began the eager wait for the next. The publisher had announced that the series would have six volumes and Mammoth Hunters was published in 1985. I didn’t think we’d have to wait long for the next, but the times between novels got longer and longer. It was five years later for book four, Plains of Passage, then 12 years for book five, Shelters of Stone. Another nine years later, the last in the series, Land of Painted Caves, was published and not worth the wait. While the first four are wonderful, Auel gets more and more captivated by her own research, delving into pages and pages of boring descriptions. Plus, at the end, the character growth of her main protagonist, Ayla, and her mate, Jondolar, are thrown out the window, like Auel forgot what she had written before. Foreshadowing in previous novels was discarded, and the behavior of Jondolar at the end was stupid given the emotional changes he’d gone through. But, I do still enjoy the earlier books mostly revolving around winter, either living in the season, or preparing for it. So it is enjoyable in the colder months to read about imagined human life and societies in the ice age.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwen – Published September 2025. This story is slow to get started, and is a character study kind of novel, unfolding in two timelines. First, a humanities professor, Tom Metcalf, in the year 2119 is looking for the single written copy of an epic poem “Corona” which was lost after a single reading at a dinner party. It is a time in the aftermath of nuclear war and climate change where England is no longer a large island, but now an archipelago of a multitude of islands due to sea level rise. The internet is centered in Africa, where the totality of everyone’s emails, letters, articles, journals, interviews, anything electronic is available to anyone who wants to look. In reading everything written by the people attending the dinner, the quest to find the poem itself becomes an obsession for Tom. The past is 2014, over 100 years before, where a poet, Frances Blundy, writes an epic poem on the occasion of his wife Vivien’s birthday, reads it aloud to the dinner guests, then it is never seen again. The second half of the book is told in 2014 from Vivien’s point of view as narrator, with startling revelations, a shocking secret about the poem, and its disappearance. Be sure to read the notes after, one is part of the story, the other amusing. Available in print, Audible and on Kindle.

When Wanderers Cease to Roam – A Travelers Journal of Staying Put by Vivien Swift – I saw this book review on my internet friend Jeanie’s blog Marmalade Gypsy. We often find books on each other’s reading lists. This one was so intriguing that I immediately went to the internet to buy a copy. It is one of those snack read books, best taken in small increments, reading one of the entries like a diary, or gazing at a lovely drawing thinking about the scene it is depicting. So far I have only looked at the entries for January, with artwork of beautiful scenes of snow in trees and meadows, whimsical snowmen doing funny things, and thoughts on ‘winterizing your mind’. I am going to take a year to read the whole book, saving each month to read in its turn. I know it will be wonderful. Look at the sidebar for used copies from other Amazon sellers for best deals.

So let’s chat about books! What are you reading that you are enjoying? Do you have favorites that you re-read from time to time?