Rating: 3/5 Summary: When three beautiful girls come to the small town of Capri, Gemma and her sister are suspicious. The girls are eerily beautiful and are completely pretentious. They don’t speak to anyone, but they want to speak to Gemma. Gemma is a swimmer and she goes out for nightly swims in the bay by her house. One night, the girls entrance her to join them and her life is never the same. This book had a lot of potential. It wasn’t bad per […]
An Emphatic “Meh”
I picked up Robert Kurson’s latest book Pirate Hunters after really enjoying its predecessor. Shadow Divers was about the discovery of a German submarine that had sunk off the coast of New Jersey. I was hooked on that book, as Kurson talked about the divers’ near death experiences, the eerie feeling of exploring a ship full of the corpses of young enemy combatants, and the research necessary to positively identify the vessel. It was the story of adventure and discovery that kept me enthralled until […]
A Lackluster Friends to Lovers Romance
Over the past several years I’ve been slowly but surely making my way through the Kowalski Family books by Shannon Stacey. They cover the romantic lives of the Kowalski cousins in New England and the people in their lives. I started reading these because Ms. Stacey writes the kind of straightforward, serviceable romance novels that let the reader slow down, read about some characters who aren’t too far from yourself and people you know, but just far enough to be fiction, and have a little […]
Not as Illuminating as the Title Would Suggest
Marie-Laure is a blind Parisian girl whose father works at the Museum of Natural History. When she goes blind at age 6, her father builds a to-scale model of their neighborhood so she can learn her way around gradually. Then the Nazis occupy Paris. They flee to Saint-Malo, where they find refuge with extended relatives, Madame Manec and shell-shocked Etienne. Oh, and Marie-Laure’s father carries a jewel with him that may or may not be magical but is most certainly valuable, which is sought tirelessly by a German jeweler, von Rumpel. Meanwhile, […]
Underwhelmingly Beautiful Ruins
This book came highly recommended to me by more than one friend, and I went in with high hopes. I am sure it suffered by following the superb Hild in my reading queue. But here I am a few days later and still I can only muster a “meh.” Here’s the summary: In the early 60s, in a sleepy little Italian fishing village, Pasquale dreams of upgrading his “Hotel Adequate View” to a resort along the lines of neighboring Cinque Terre. One day a beautiful American actress […]