Why I bought the book: Magic Lessons is a prequel to the book Practical Magic.  I am ashamed to admit I had never read Practical Magic (which I have now remedied along with book two in the series The Rules of Magic and a third will be out later this year The Book of Magic ). I will likely purchase her entire back list and add her to my top favorite writer list. I had enjoyed the 1998 movie with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Magic Lessons traces the origin of the Owens bloodline starting with Maria Owens in the 1600s and her mother Rebecca. Rebecca leaves her daughter Maria with a woman named Hannah Owens, so she can chase love. Thus begins the Owens women's fraught entanglement with romantic love which seems doomed to bring them sorrow even as they help other women with their relationship woes. Hannah teaches Maria to always love someone who loves you back. However, like her wild mother, Maria falls for a weak man who leaves her pregnant and alone in the world. Maria follow...

If you haven't been introduced to Kerry Greenwood's twenty-one book cozy mystery series set in 1920s Melbourne, Australia, you are in for a treat. I streamed the entire series and read all the books in 2020. Phrynne Fisher (pronounced fry-nee) is a delightful amateur sleuth. Her war experience and intelligence work make her capacity for finding trouble believable. Her rags to unexpected riches backstory means Phrynne is free to do as she pleases and does not care who she offends. She returns to Australia from England, after a brief post war detour as a bohemian in Paris, to set up shop as a detective. In the television series, the costumes and sets are a feast for the eyes. The first television series follows the books fairly closely, with two exceptions I will discuss later. The writers were successful in maintaining the characters and feel of the books in the subsequent cases. Relationships in the books are slightly different than in the series. In the books, Phrynne's b...

My husband gifted me a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas a few years ago. He had jumped on the Kindle bandwagon a few years before that. I was still stubbornly clinging to paper over plastic. Then we moved from the Midwest to Florida which involved serious downsizing. So the majority of our massive book collection had to go. Parting was such sweet sorrow. Finite Folio Cover My Kindle sat unused for a while other than to purchase a cover that made it look like a book. I gradually added to my Kindle library. Soon, I had more than one page of options and became frustrated until I learned how to create collections, which you can learn more about here . Still, I was not content. I missed actual bookshelves with books neatly lined up by author and series in order. As my Kindle content grew, I tired of searching through books I had already read. Around this time, on an unrelated note, Apple completely changed its Itunes store to favor streaming. Thank goodness I still had two iPODs and my musi...

Unless you were already living in a war zone, a global pandemic is the probably scariest thing you have experienced in a very long time. If you were already prone to depression and anxiety, there is nothing like a plague to ramp up the tension setting to high. It is okay to feel scared and frozen. To wonder why you should bother to write a book when the world feels like it is ending. What's the point? Who can afford to buy it? How could you possibly launch it? Are publishers even accepting new works? The fact is books are getting many of us through this difficult time. Book sales are up.  Some are reading dystopian books for reassurance. Fictional worlds survived. People carried on. In many countries, dictators are in power and authoritarianism is on the rise. We may be inspired by heroes who fought to overturn corruption. The same applies to historical books set in war time and disaster thrillers. There is comfort in knowing someone somewhere managed to survive natural disasters, ...

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Charles Dicken's words have never been more relevant as we endure a worldwide pandemic with widespread quarantines and stay at home orders. I have read a many dystopian novels and it certainly feels like we are living in one. In most dystopian novels, humans survive. Whether we continue to thrive or wither is on us. It can bring out the best in people, and the worst. Here is a list of ten books inspired by outbreaks. 1 .  Andromeda Strain   (1970) by Michael Crichton is by far the scariest tale I remember from my childhood. Images of people dissolving into dust stuck with me. A military space probe brings microbes back to earth, setting off an outbreak. Scientists race to understand and contain the threat. They keep it secret with total news blackouts. Of course back then we didn't have 24/7 news feeds or social media. I never looked at our space missions the same way again. 2 .  A Journal of the Plag...