by Ken Steele Rating: ***** The Promise of Unbroken Straw unfolds the rags-to-riches story of the Landrum family through the eyes of the younger son, Paul, using dual timelines, one set in the mid-1940s and the other in the mid-1980s. Motherless, living with his father, Jake, grandfather, Eli, and brother, Tim, Paul navigates an awkward adolescence marred by secrets, guilt, and Jake’s cold aloofness while the family scratches a living in the wheat fields of Oklahoma during W

by Jim Bates Rating: ***** Bates’s On Rainy Lake is a collection of eleven short stories mainly set in and around the Hennepin County and Orchard Lake areas of Minnesota. They are broadly contemporary, although characters unburden themselves and reveal historical reasons for their current motivations or situations through flashbacks, memories, and conversations, both internal and with others. Nine tales are written from first-person perspectives, and all main protagonists ar

by Kathryn Amurra Rating: **** When Erin Dovetree’s grandmother, Rose, mentions her new landlord, Will Abbott, to Erin, she is clearly trying to matchmake. Amused but not interested, Erin dismisses the ploy. However, when she meets the handsome, enigmatic Will, their attraction to each other is immediate. Both fight against their growing feelings, but for different reasons. Erin has unresolved trust issues, and Will happens to be nearly one hundred and seventy years old, curs

by Erik Larson Rating: ***** The World’s Columbian Exposition, hosted by Chicago in 1893 and known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was a monumental feat of architecture, engineering, and design, showcasing not only art, antiquities, and cultural exhibits but also innovative, ground-breaking ideas and technologies of the late-Victorian age. However, the wonders of “The White City,” as the fair was additionally named due to the buildings being painted white, came at a tremendous m

by Wendy Waters Rating: ***** With her entrancing singing voice and heavenly face to match, fifteen-year-old serving girl Miriam Tilby would always be a target for Rathe Courteney, the Master of Radclyffe Hall, as her mother, Eirinn, feared. Six years later, in 1593, accused of bewitching him, poisoning his wife, and pregnant with their child, Miriam is sentenced to be burned at the stake in Smithfield, London. But the night before the pyre is due to be lit, a black-clad stra

by Adam Cosco Rating: **** Barbara and Teddy O’Brien desperately want to believe their daughter, Ava, an anxious, watchful eleven-year-old, when she breaks down and describes an alarming incident that occurred during the school day with her classmates. With no proof and unreliable witnesses, Barbara, along with almost everyone else, is inclined to dismiss Ava’s bizarre account of rituals and masked figures as a product of her daughter’s overwrought, febrile imagination, but

by Emilia Rosa Rating: **** Finding Cristina: Treasures on Earth is the third installment in Rosa’s Finding Cristina series *. It’s 1933, Cristina is thirty and now has three children with husband, Robert. Together with their extended, blended family members, they’ve relocated to an idyllic smallholding in southern Brazil, the land of the Gaúchos . However, Cristina’s charmingly rustic existence begins to be threatened by unexplained acts of sabotage, revenge missions,

by John A. Heldt Rating: ***** Grieving the loss of their grandfather, Rory, who had raised them following their parents’ death eight years earlier, twenty-two-year-old Noah Maclean and younger brother, Jake, are stunned to discover the family secret, a stone shed that enables time travel. The siblings decide to take a trip to 1776, a defining year in American history, before returning to 2024 and destroying the shed, which is beginning to prove a curse rather than a blessing

by Christy J. Breedlove Rating: **** Desperate to escape their bleak existence in Cloud’s Rest , a dystopian city built in the sky and governed by oppression, four teenagers escape to the ground below, an unrecognizable landscape ravaged centuries earlier by an earthquake and consequent tsunamis. The four hope to find sanctuary with a community of like-minded individuals rumored to reside in the devastated environment, but instead, they encounter vicious, mutated animals and

by Cecelia Tichi Rating: **** When a Newport society picnic hosted by their normally charming friend, Theo Bulkeley, takes a strange turn and Theo disappears, Val and Roddy DeVere don’t hesitate to meet him in New York as requested. Theo is a broken man and begs for the DeVeres’ help. He is convinced that his cousin Phoebe’s Irish butler, Anson Burke, is planning to murder her, just as Theo is confident Burke killed her twin sister, Judith, a year earlier. Val has doubts abou