The series is so delightfully oddball overall and I love it. This volume went a little off the path, but I'm hoping vol. 19 will bring it back.

This book, while a bit slow, had a great ending. The ending is something I never could have predicted and the whole book I continued trying to figure out what the twist would be. I enjoyed that the book felt so captivating and real.

The Island House takes place on Nantucket with many twists and turns. The story revolves around a typical Summer family, the Vickeries, with ties to Boston but enjoy living on the Island. During the Summer each of the children invite friends to stay with them. Susanna Vickery affectionately refers to the friends as her ‘Summer children.’ Nancy Thayer paints Nantucket with positive images. It is a great Summer Beach read.

Amazing book that speaks to women to take back their rights from the men in their lives. To speak up for themselves even when they die… the audio book was wonderfully done. Highly recommend ????

Two brothers and their wives share a 2 family house in Brooklyn. Rose and Mort have 3 daughters, while Helen and Abe have 4 sons; Mort longs for a son. Rose and Helen, who are extremely close, deliver their 4th and 5th babies on the same day, during the Great Blizzard of 1947. Rose has post-partum depression, so Helen steps in to help her and her family. Rose ends up resenting Helen, and refuses to spend time with her. The story goes through 23 years of life from the perspectives of Rose, Helen, Mort, Abe, and, later, that of 2 of the daughters. We see the differing impact various decisions and occurrences have on each of them. I highly recommend this book if you like character-driven stories.

A historical fiction novel propelled by a mystery. A young bookbinder is on a hunt for the truth of the story after she finds a written confession of a murder hidden in the binding of a burned book. This letter hints at a story of forbidden love, a lost fortune and murder. Lillian Delaney , apprentice to a bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, feels trapped between the oppressiveness of her father's failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man's profession. When she is given this burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds hidden beneath the binding, a fifty year old letter speaking of love, fortune and murder. She is pulled into the mystery of young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story.

A delightful, very entertaining novel set in 1965 when Helen Gurley Brown took over as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine and made it wildly successful. We learn about Helen's background and also the stories about the "girls" she hires as her editors.

I'm mixed on this book. There was a lot of twists and turns, which is usually good, but many were unnecessary. Guy kills his wife or did he? A million suspects. There were also too many red herrings, so much so, that it was obvious there were just that. The reveal was underwhelming and a bit cliché. The lies, revealed with more lies, made the truth seem insignificant. No real characters too root for, and unsatisfying ending.

Before there was Jessica Fletcher, Columbo and Sam Spade there was Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle introduced me to the origins of Sherlock Holmes and his meeting up with Doctor Watson; how they became friends and heir working together to solve presumably unsolvable mysteries. A little slow at times but fascinating. Not a perfect 5 but certainly a 4 star read. I am glad my son suggested it and I get to use it for bingo.

A vivid recreation of pre-Holocaust shtetl life in Poland based on the many Yizkorbooks that were published after World War II. Poignant, moving, and ultimately very sad. It also describes the native Polish antisemitism of the 1930s -- so relevant to the rise of antisemitism in our own days. Recommended.