Book Club Picks – Rachel Reads & Reviews

Book Club Picks

Book of the Month: Crocodile on the Sandbank

A bit of The Mummy, a bit of a stand-alone Agatha Christie, the adventures of Amelia Peabody feature a plain, spinster along the lines of Jane Eyre. Albeit a more sprightly Jane Eyre what with the shooting, escavating and mummy-hunting. Let me back up a bit with the death of Amelia’s father, she decides to…
Book of the Month: The Great Alone

Ah the great Alaskan wilderness, a place to reconnect to nature. Or in Hannah’s novel, a place where family demons come to tear them apart with no chance for help in the middle of a blizzard. Aka a nightmare in my thinking.
Finished Nancy Drew!

It only took over a year and browsing through Internet archives to get to the final two Nancy Drew books that escaped my grasp-The Clue of the Whistling Bapipes and The Strange Message in the Parchment. Oddly enough, they both involve a lot of sheep. The Bagpipes have Nancy heading to her ancestral Scotland homeland…
Author Highlight: Coco Simon

Get ready for this one, with 58 books spreading across 4 different series, this prolific author has terrific taste.
Fall Nonfiction

Humans of Judaism edited by Nikki Schreiber Taken from the social media hashtag, this is a collection of stories from Instagram highlighting the breadth of the Jewish diaspora, their traditions and stories and tales of survival. From sweet stories of Bashert (think kismet) where two Holocaust survivors meet again in New York after the war, and…
Fall Comics

Titans: Starfire by Kami Garcia. Illustrated by Gabriel Picolo. After the less than steller preceding books, Garcia gets the plot momentum moving with a good dose of character development. Much like the others, Kori thinks she is a normal teenage, albeit a bit more introverted due to her Ehlers-danlos syndrome making socialization a literal pain…
Book Hightlight: Tales From A Not-So-Bratty Little Sister

I know, I know. I admitted in my last post that I have too aged out of the series to enjoy it. But I still keep coming back because I have to know how it ends. . . I have a feeling it might be coming soon, but Russell is certainly stretching it out.
Fall Romances

Full Exposure by Thien-Kim Lam It’s been almost two years since I read the first book in the series, but it was wonderful to return to the girls of the sex positive series. Josie is a boudoir photographer but she’s been feeling burnt out. Plus it may be a steamy business, it’s not always a…
Book of the Month: Northanger Abbey

So we didn’t quite finish the gothic satire within the spooky season month but we got there!
Author Highlight: Suzanne Nelson

I may have briefly mentioned Suzanne Nelson’s works before as her Heart and Salsa novel was the book that got me into the global coming of age series, S.A.S.S. Today I’m going to focus on her Foodie series which is just as the title implies- A collection of stand-alone novel focusing on how sweet and…