Insomnia by Stephen King is very different from his other horror novels: less gruesome, gory, and terrifying, more supernatural and speculative. It will challenge any preconceived notions or beliefs you have about fate and chance, life and death, and everyone’s purpose and even powers in this world. A sleep-deprived elderly man named Ralph is susceptible…
Month: January 2016
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a Newberry Medal Award winner about a 17th century girl from Barbados, forced to move to Connecticut with her Aunt and Uncle. Though she has two female cousins close to her age, Kit finds the homespun, laborious Puritan life completely frigid compared to her childhood of warm beaches, endless…
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” Rebecca is the greatest and most haunting Gothic novel, the one to which all others written since have been compared. Set in the English countryside in the 1920’s, in a mansion by the sea, Maxim de Winter lives with his much younger new bride, whose name…
Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
What frontier man, in need of a sturdy, homemaking wife, would ever consider marrying the most expensive prostitute in town? Certainly not a resolute, guileless farmer who’s been saving himself for his future wife. But Michael Hosea, despite living in the hard frontier time of the California gold rush, is captivated by Angel, a prostitute…
Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman
Huguette Clark was probably the wealthiest woman whom history forgot. Heir to a copper fortune and raised in a mansion on Fifth Avenue of 42 rooms, with only four family members, and a father old enough to be her grandfather, it seems she was more than bound to become a least a little different from…
The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip
Periwinkle’s father disappeared in his little row boat out to sea, an event which also caused her mother to lose both heart and mind to the sea. Though only a maid at the local inn, Peri decides to try hexing the sea using what she remembers from the elderly witch who abandoned the cottage she…
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Buried deep in the woods in Cornwall, England, is a home that hasn’t been inhabited in 40 years. The house by the lake, Loeanneth, is stumbled upon by a young detective named Sadie. She is on a forced holiday from work for becoming obsessed with a case of an abandoned toddler, which holds more of…
The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
Josey Cirrini’s mother is a bitter, wealthy woman who judges her daughter incessantly, demanding to be chauffeured to social events, and in waiting on her, Josey missed having a life of her own. At thirty, Josey spends all of her free time alone, hiding in her secret closet filled with the forbidden sweets and travel…
A Cupcake and a Book 