by Jonathan Chalstrey Rating: *** Heart  follows the adventures of Hernando Bustamante, a sixteenth-century surgeon. Apprenticed at sixteen to the renowned Doctor Bartolo in Seville, he is forced to flee to Italy by the Spanish Inquisition, where he becomes a professor of medicine at Bologna University. But when Hernando falls in love with Euphemia, a nun, he is expelled from Bologna and takes up a position as an assistant surgeon in Padua. Yet fate conspires again, and Busta

by Nino Gugunishvili Rating: **** There Was a Garden Once  is a concise collection of twenty-four autobiographical musings and essays, some just a couple of pages long. Interwoven with humorous reflections on everyday life are deeper meditations on grief and aging. Gugunishvili’s latest compilation * is a little book of delights, leaving the reader smiling despite the plaintive tone of several narratives. Gugunishvili writes with a natural, chatty intimacy that never feels f

by John A. Heldt Rating: ***** The Winding Road  continues the Maclean Brothers' time-traveling saga from the first installment, The Patriots * . Despite the entreaties of his fiancée, Abigail Ward, Noah rides out to enlist in the Continental Army, ready for war in the late eighteenth century, yet armed with a secret cache of modern weaponry. Jake stays behind with the Wards, helping however he can while growing inseparable from their younger daughter, Rachel, Abby’s sister.

by Jennifer Wizbowski Rating: ***** Set in early eighteenth-century Venice, Poinsettia Girl unfolds the story of Agata della Pietà, who, at age ten, was placed by her dying Nonna , Guilelma, at the Ospedale de la Pietà , an orphanage that placed emphasis on nurturing musical talent and housed its own prestigious and mysterious conservatoire, the Figlie del Coro , for whom Vivaldi was a teacher and composer. Agata is supremely gifted, not only as a soprano but also as a copyi