Category: Books

Book Critic, Book Review, Books, Literary Criticism, Reading

Review: Secrets in the Mist (Gothic Myths #1) by Anna Lee Huber

by The Lit Bitch5 Comments on Review: Secrets in the Mist (Gothic Myths #1) by Anna Lee Huber

I have been craving a Gothic romantic suspense novel for a while, I just haven’t been able to find something more contemporary than Victoria Holt. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Victoria Holt but I just wanted something a little more up-to-date.

I downloaded a sample of this one months ago but just never got around to starting it. So on a whim I decided to just read the sample and see how it was. I was completely hooked from the first couple of chapters!

Foggy marshes, a chance encounter on a misty night, a handsome stranger masquerading as someone else, spies, and a damsel in distress? This book had it all! I found myself wondering why in the world I didn’t start this one sooner!

I haven’t read anything by Anna Lee Huber, but I’ve had her book series, Lady Darby Mysteries, on my radar for years, but for some reason I just never have gotten around to reading it.

The description of this book caught my eye, especially since it’s marketed to fans of Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart….I can never resist a Gothic romantic/suspense novel!

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Book Critic, Book Review, Books, Literary Criticism, Reading

Review: If I Could Tell You by Elizabeth Wilhide

by The Lit BitchLeave a Comment on Review: If I Could Tell You by Elizabeth Wilhide

Ahhh war romances how I love you! When this one came across my desk for review, I jumped at the chance to review it. The description was tantalizing and I just knew I had to read this one!

For some reason I just love books about ill-fated or impossible romances and while this one had an adultery element, that wasn’t a deal breaker for me….in fact I was curious to see how that angle would work within the story.

England, 1939: Julia Compton has a beautifully well-ordered life. Once a promising pianist, she now has a handsome husband, a young son she adores, and a housekeeper who takes care of her comfortable home. Then, on the eve of war, a film crew arrives in her coastal town. She falls in love.

The consequences are devastating. Penniless, denied access to her son, and completely unequipped to fend for herself, she finds herself adrift in wartime London with her lover, documentary filmmaker Dougie Birdsall. While Dougie seeks truth wherever he can find it, Julia finds herself lost.

As the German invasion looms and bombs rain down on the city, she faces a choice—succumb to her fate, or fight to forge a new identity in the heat of war (Summary from Goodreads).

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Books, Reading

Special Feature: WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

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WAR AND PEACE is one of those novels that people always claim to have read but have never actually picked up the book because…..1400+ pages is A LOT of reading.

I am not one of those people…..I freely admit I have NEVER read this book. I haven’t even attempted! At first the length scared me but after reading other lengthy books of this same caliber, I have since considered tackling this mammoth book!

So I will be running a review of this one in June but in the mean time I wanted to call everyone’s attention to this beautiful edition from Penguin Classics!

Full confession…..I decided to commit to review based solely on this edition and cover. It’s beautiful! I love the cloth bound copy and design. The edition itself is designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (I reviewed one of her children’s books last year and I proudly display it in my nursery!). I am a cover snob and fully admit it. I love this edition/cover so much that I was willing to shelve other books in order to read this one.

Plus I saw the WAR AND PEACE television mini series earlier this year and based on how interesting that was, I thought maybe it was time to dive into this book once and for all so I can proudly state that I read it!

At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself.

In WAR AND PEACE, Leo Tolstoy entwines grand themes—conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate—with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.

Helmed as one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature, and one of the longest novels ever written, WAR AND PEACE is as much a philosophical discussion as it is a work of fiction.

Book Critic, Book Review, Books, Literary Criticism, Reading

Review: A Death by Any Other Name (Lady Montfort Mystery #3) by Tessa Arlen

by The Lit Bitch2 Comments on Review: A Death by Any Other Name (Lady Montfort Mystery #3) by Tessa Arlen

I am always on the look out for new murder mysteries, preferably with a female lead ‘detectives’ and set in England. While this isn’t my first novel by this author, it felt new to me. I read Tessa Arlen’s first book in this series, DEATH OF A DISHONORABLE GENTLEMAN, back in early 2015 and though I wasn’t completely hooked at the beginning, I was invested enough to finish it and was rewarded for my tenacity.

I didn’t read the second book in this series for some reason, but when the third book came up for review it sounded rather good so I decided to give her books another go. I wish now that I had read the second book before this one, but over all, the third book read find as a ‘stand alone’.

Set in the day leading up to WWI, the elegant Lady Montfort and her redoubtable housekeeper, Mrs. Jackson, investigate a murder among a group of amateur rose-breeders. When Mrs. Jackson receives a visit from a cook who believes she was an indirect witness to murder from a poisoned dish of breakfast kedgeree Lady Montfort promises to do what she can to clear the cook’s name, and contrives an invitation to Hyde Castle, the home of a self-made millionaire, to investigate a murder of concealed passions and secret desires.

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Books, Reading

Special Feature: THE BOOK OF POLLY by Kathy Hepinstall

by The Lit Bitch1 Comment on Special Feature: THE BOOK OF POLLY by Kathy Hepinstall

I have a soft spot for local writers and when I saw that this author lives in Portland, OR I had to at least do a special feature on her novel!

This is an unforgettable story about the grip of love in a truly quirky family, told with a particular blend of sass and warmth. Polly is one of those can’t-forget-her female characters with whom readers are destined to fall in love, and her daughter Willow’s coming of age story is one to which both mothers and their daughters will relate.

Publishers Weekly says, “Polly is a hybrid of Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies and Shirley MacLaine’s Ouiser Boudreaux in Steel Magnolias… [THE BOOK OF POLLY] is full of laughter and warmth” and Kirkus Reviews said, “classic elements of Southern comedy—evil twins, people dropping dead, a faith healer, a river-rafting trip—surround a lovable pair of central characters.”

The character Polly is based, in part, on Kathy Hepinstall’s own wicked-tounged mother and Hepinstall has incorporated her mother’s sayings, and some family anecdotes in coloring the narrative of THE BOOK OF POLLY. Although the story itself is fictional, Polly’s stories and persona are on every page.

Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late fifties when Willow was born, so Willow knows she’s here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow’s father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere. It’s just her and bigger-than-life Polly.

Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and especially Polly’s life pre-Willow. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, fifty years ago and vow never to return? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun the Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her past?

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