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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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✨✨✨ Yes! The early buzz for Yesteryear is well-deserved! A pious mega influencer is the woman we love to hate. Publicly, she’s the perfect wife and mother, praising God and radiating rays of sunshine through her social media while privately her thoughts swim in venom and self-importance. Online, she’s the woman who does it all: bakes the perfect sourdough loaf while she lovingly tends to her husband and brood of kids on their rustic ranch—until one day she wakes up in the 1800s and has to live the life she’s pretended to master all the while trying to figure out how she got there. The chapters blast between her 1800s homestead and the years that built up to her superstardom.  The writing snaps and claws for your attention. The main character is a snarky, narcissistic, hypocrite. I couldn’t wait for her world to fall apart, and I wasn’t disappointed. The ending had a big, delicious twist. Exhilarating!!   ❗❗Publish date: April 7, 2026 🎥 It's already been optioned for a movie, ...
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Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon

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Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon  This book was nothing like I thought it would be. In my mind, I had visions of Anna and the King dancing together—an enemies-to-lovers-type trope born from a clip of the 1956  The King and I  musical starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. I’ve never seen the movie, only that clip, and so I looked forward to a wonderful turn of tides. Boy was I wrong!    This historical fiction is based on two memoirs that Anna penned after being in Siam (later Thailand) for five long years.  But there is no love connection between her and the king. The king was a despotic beast who had 83 children with his wives and many concubines. Although he was in the priesthood for 30 years before he became king, he skipped many of the lessons on compassion, empathy, or general humanity. As king, he had a habit of having wives, slaves, and harem women flogged and locked in a dark, moldy dungeon. Other times, he’d just have them execute...
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Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall

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OMG! I loved this book!     Little nine-year-old Starla won my heart. She’s compassionate and witty, and delivers a narration that snaps, crackles, and pops.     In 1963 Starla decides to run away from home to find her mother in Nashville and avoid being sent to a reform school. On the road, a kind black woman, who has a white baby in her truck, pulls over to offer Starla a lift. That’s the beginning of a hair-raising, life-changing adventure where they bond and save each other. I couldn’t put this book down.   One of the blurbs on the cover calls the book “wise, funny, tender…destined to become a classic.” I wholeheartedly agree. Starla is as spirited and memorable as Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, or Addie Pray of “Paper Moon.”  And oh, how I loved Eula, too—such a loving and gentle soul. Both of them snuggled in my heart.💛🧡   Here are some of the snappy quotes from Starla:   “I went back to working on the window, but the dang ...
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The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

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 The Glass Menagerie  by Tennessee Williams. This is a tragic, classic play that I had to read in high school. Yet the only thing I remembered about it was that the daughter Laura was shy and introverted and was comforted by her collection of glass animals. But as I reread it as an adult I now see and feel so much more than I did through the eyes of a teenager. I see how impossibly trapped all three characters were.   The 23-year-old daughter, Laura, is “ crippled,” not just in having one shorter leg than the other and having to wear a brace, but because she's emotionally crippled with an inferiority complex. She's terrified of everything—even of going to business school.    The mother is trapped in a life where she has no resources. She was taught to be a housewife with no outside job, only to serve the family, completely dependent on her husband for financial support—just like Project 2025 is trying to bring us back to. The play takes place in the 1930s and he...
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The Glutton by AK Blakemore

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 The Glutton by AK Blakemore. This is an unusual historical fiction set around the French revolution, a dire and punishing time of great social divides. A near-death incident alters a man's physical constitution where he remains hungry no matter how much he eats. He gorges himself at street performances eating not just large quantities of food but also devouring unthinkable things from corks and belts to a trough of entrails and more unimaginable things.   Blakemore's writing is bewitching sophistication with a glut of extravagant words co-mingled with crude phraseology. Words crowned with an air of pretension glide next to vulgar expressive jargon - the his and hers set of “C” words make repeated appearances.   If you're adverse to violence, squeamish when someone eats a dead rat or worse, or offended by foul language, this may not be the book for you, yet it just may be the perfect read for someone coloring outside the lines.   While I did like the book, some thing...
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Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth

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 Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth. This is such a sweet and tender tale about a highly successful JK-Rowling type author of a fantasy kids series who gets early onset dementia and needs help completing the last book in the series. When Libby puts out a plea to a superfan to hear the stories she proposes for the Following children's fate, 11-year-old peanut bursts into her life like a whirling ray of sunshine. Peanut is a fearless, can-do ball of energy, who doesn't always get things right yet plows forward despite her own set of curveballs life has thrown at her. Heartbreak is something Libby and Peanut have in common, but their unlikely collaboration is hopeful, humorous, and full of magical charm. I loved getting swept away in their personal stories as they work to finish the children's story. Happy Reading! Annette
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The Absinthe Forger by Evan Rail

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Bottoms Up! This is an absorbing tour into the world of absinthe, the notorious alcohol that was globally banned by 1915 and then widely legalized again in the early 2000s. The author examines how one man fooled collectors into paying exorbitant prices for bottles of forged “pre-ban” absinthe.     Alongside the uncovering of the forger, we learn about the history of absinthe, the bad reputation it gained, underground absintheurs, as well as bootlegging in Switzerland. There is a mystique about the drink, including the way it visually changes as water is dripped into it over special spoons balancing sugar cubes atop the glasses. Drinking it is almost a ritual. A culture is enmeshed in the absinthe scene that rivals the enthusiasms of oenophiles.  I found all of it very informative and entertaining.    I’m not much of a drinker, but I wouldn’t mind trying this just once. I want to see the whole process—an interactive drinking experience. One should be enough ...
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