In mid-November, a friend of mine randomly said, “I have a book I think you’d like.” If you’ve ever been the recipient of that kind of statement, you may understand the slight bristling that I initially experienced. How does she know what kind of book I like to read? I thought, while also gamely writing…
Tag: fiction
Book Review: The Wednesday Wars
I have been listing The Wednesday Wars as a comparative title when I query literary agents for my own novel for the past year. However, until recently, I had not actually read the book. I was just going off of the recommendations of my mom, who taught the book as a middle grade gifted teacher….
England | 2022
After an excellent holiday abroad in Paris the previous year, my family booked a trip to England & Ireland at the end of 2022. By then, international travel had largely opened up and we all felt comfortable taking the trip during the school break (3/4 of us are in education of some sort). The year…
Book Review: The Paris Novel
Once upon a time, my best friend and I owned a business. Of the many lovely experiences we offered, Book & Dinner Club was my favorite. Over the course of six weeks, we would host a group of women to discuss a book with a strong focus on food and/or travel and feed them home-cooked…
Book Review: The Moonstone
Per usual, I bought The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, during a Barnes and Noble perusal of “the classics.” Hailed on its back cover as one of the world’s first detective novels, I was intrigued and a bit confused why I had never even heard of the title. My interest piqued, I bought it. Of course,…
Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See
I am certain I had looked at All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr on the shelves at Barnes & Noble for years without really considering purchasing a copy. Last fall, I when I saw promotional videos for the forthcoming Netflix mini-series of the same name, I was intrigued to find out more…
Book Review: A Season of Second Chances
When a friend loaned me her copy of A Season of Second Chances by Jenny Bayliss, I was skeptical at best. Despite the saccharine description of a chef hosting a book club in a coastal British town (all things that are near & dear to my heart) and a promise that there wouldn’t be too…
Book Review: A Country Doctor
I’m writing this book review on a coach bus en route from Prague to Heidelberg, Germany. It’s scheduled to be a six-hour trip so I have plenty of activities to keep myself entertained—although admittedly my favourite thing to do is probably just staring out the window in silence. However, I just finished reading A Country…
A Novel Idea
Story time… it’s a long one I am nearing the end of the writing process for my first book manuscript. It is a historical fiction novel aimed at middle readers (typically defined ages 9-12, although I’ll admit that the vocabulary is rather more advanced than most 9-10-year-old children). The novel is the first in what…
Book Review: The Secret Garden
I grew up in the heyday of the 90s movies. Disney was still animating by hand, cartoons were a normal part of weekend plans and live-action movies had that specific film-processing quality that made everything feel magical and nostalgic. Such was the case for the 1993 film, The Secret Garden, which I watched with consistent…
L.M.Beatty 