The River of No Return

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway is a time travel novel starting in present day New England and travelling back to 19th century London. There is a mysterious society called The Guild that is able to move back and forth through time.

I love time travel novels, and this one did not disappoint; full of romance, mystery and adventure. I loved it all the way until the end when it left me hanging with many unanswered questions. Hoping a sequel is in the works. A fun read.

Minding Frankie

Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy is a sweet novel about a little girl named Frankie, whose mother dies the day she is born. She is raised by a community of well meaning people in a small Dublin neighborhood.

Her Father learns about her only weeks before she is born, and tries hard to give up drinking, find a better job and do the best he can to raise Frankie. He has help from a wonderful array of characters who try to protect Frankie from a bitter social worker. Binchy does a great job of getting the reader to care about all of them.

Beautifully written, heartfelt, feel good novel. Goes great with a hot cup of tea on a cold winters day.

The Miniaturist

The Miniaturist is the highly popular new novel by Jesse Burton. Set in Amsterdam in 1686, the story is based on the actual miniature cabinet house made for Petronella Oortman, on view today in The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. This is the one historical truth in the novel that Burton imagines her story around.

It is a fascinating portrait of 17th century Amsterdam at the height of the Dutch East India Company. There are many secrets being kept in the house Petronella moves into, where her new husband and his sister live. She is mostly alone except for the servants and her cabinet house. I was drawn into the tale as soon as the tiny furniture and cryptic notes started appearing, and was most fascinated to find out the miniaturist was a woman.

However, the miniaturist eludes Nella and the reader throughout the book, and although this added mystery to the story for a while, I found it frustrating by the end. An original novel that transported me to old Amsterdam, however, mildly disappointing by the end.

Hurricane Sisters

Hurricane Sisters is a novel by Dorthea Benton Frank set in Charleston, South Carolina. It focuses on the lives of three generations of women. Told from several points of view, sometimes the novel worked and sometimes it didn't.

It was a little preachy about domestic violence and abuse against women. There are some very sobering facts here about how many women die each day due to domestic violence and how South Carolina leads the country in the number of homicides.

An okay, slightly predictable read.

In the Memorial Room

In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame (author of An Angel at My Table) is a newly published novel ten years after Frame's death and forty years after it was written.

Harry Gill has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, and he arrives in the small French village of Menton, only to find the Memorial Room where he is supposed to write, cold, dank and with no facilities. 

Frame is a wonderful writer, and this is quite a funny little novel based on her own year in Menton as winner of the Mansfield Fellowship. Frame is one of New Zealand's greatest writers; if you haven't read her yet, you should.

The Valley of Amazement

The Valley of Amazement is the new novel by Amy Tan. This book is set in Shanghai at the turn of the century and follows the lives of an American mother who runs a high class courtesan house and her half-Chinese daughter, who has never met her father.

Tan is a great writer of historical fiction, and often explores mother-daughter relationships, as she does here. However, I felt like this thick book needed to be edited down from 600 pages to about 400. The story got off track so many times, it became tedious and hard to stick with. The section on how to be the perfect courtesan was way too long and mostly unnecessary.

I stuck with it to the end, and fans of Tan will probably enjoy it, but I found it tiresome.

The Shores of Paradise

The Shores of Paradise by Shirley Streshinsky is historical fiction set in Hawaii, telling of the final decades of the 1800's, marking the end of the Hawaiian monarchy and continuing into the early 1900's.

The book tells the story of True Lindstrom and Martha Moon, two orphan girls who becomes close friends with Princess Victoria Kaiulani.

This is a wonderfully written epic novel following the lives of these girls, as they grow up and they move in different directions, yet their friendship remains strong. It is a story of Hawaii and the people who shaped its future, from politics, to cattle ranching.

If you love Hawaii, you will love this book. A great read, I couldn't put it down until the end.