The Angel of Soriano is a historical romance set in Renaissance Italy, populated by a fascinating cast of characters including the infamous Cesare Borgia, who plays a major part as a villain in the book. Loosely basing the plot on an old story of a...

Zaneta Lucia Zorzi loves books. And not just any books. She loves reading books that will teach her about the laws of the natural world around her. As the only daughter of a prominent Venetian family in the seventeenth century, Zaneta Lucia is expected to...

The Scattered Flock is the second novel in The Flock Trilogy by Jana Petken. Set in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, the book immediately struck me as incredibly well researched and thought out in terms of the historical elements built into the story. The author...

The Ill-Kept Oath by C.C. Aune is the story of two young women in 1819 England; Lady Josephine Weston and Prudence Fairfeather. Josephine fears she'll always be known as an immature child, and be forever confined to her country home, but her summer begins to...

The Weif by DE Brand tells the story of Lizzie Darling, her brother, and Bella. First, Lizzie's brother is transported to Australia because of a prank that has gone terribly wrong - then Lizzie has to find out that a woman seems to not even...

The Shape of the Atmosphere, the excellent book written by a promising debut author, Jessica Dainty, is a story that I found very difficult to put down once I started reading it. Follow the story of young Gertie MacLarsen, a teenager who has felt ugly...

I had the great privilege to review Theodore Jerome Cohen’s Book 2 of The Road Less Taken, and I mentioned there the primary descriptive word for his great skill at short story writing: Gripping. Actually, I may have said: Utterly Gripping. Having the honor then...

One perfect word quickly comes to mind when trying to distill the effect of Theodore Jerome Cohen’s collection of short (truly short) stories in The Road Less Taken. The word is: Gripping. And I do not use that word lightly. I mean, utterly, sometimes devastatingly,...

The Harlem Renaissance Time Traveler’s Diary by Lashonda Beauregard is a thrilling little short story written to leave the reader guessing about many things, including the mode of time travel. The main protagonist, West Barrington, is one of the many Black musicians playing during the...

The Truth Lies: A Florida Saga by Cindy Foley is a historical novel that captures life on the ranch and develops around a huge conflict between two powerful families. The conflict that would define the hostility between the two families for generations started when an...