Our Last Wild Days by Anna Bailey: REVIEW Synopsis In Our Last Wild Days, journalist Loyal May isn’t exactly thrilled to move back to her hometown of Jacknife, Louisiana, or to work for its small local paper, but her mother is in the early stages of dementia and needs family close by. Loyal had left…

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane – REVIEW Synopsis Nature writer Robert Macfarlane travels to some of the world’s most polluted and/or threatened rivers to explore the crucial question, “Is a river alive?” My Review Is a river alive? Spoiler alert: The answer is YES, and humans should stop arrogantly trying to control or…

Review: The Magician’s Daughter by Katy Grabel Synopsis A memoir of Katy Grabel’s coming-of-age behind the scenes of her father’s traveling magic show in the 1970s. My Review I think the word that best describes this memoir is “charming.” It’s a sweet and wholesome story of 14-year-old Katy’s experiences on the road with her family’s…

Review: The Names by Florence Knapp Synopsis What’s in a name? Would your life have played out exactly the same if your parents had chosen a different name for you? In her debut novel, The Names, Florence Knapp explores this question by following three separate timelines in which Cora, the abused wife of a well-respected…

Review of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney Proto Synopsis An engaging look at the mother of almost half of the world’s languages, Proto-Indo-European, and how we are able to track the movements of its pre-historic speakers through the DNA and linguistic clues they left behind. (In other words, Proto is…

Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk Synopsis Journalist Faiz Siddiqui, who has been following Elon Musk’s life and career closely for several years, lays out the meteoric rise and beginnings of the puzzling fall of the world’s richest man. How on earth did we get here?? My Review The past 3 months have felt…

The Shivers is a collection of short stories by some of horror’s greatest contemporary writers: Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, Catriona Ward, and Owen King. It will become available on Amazon in ebook and audiobook formats on April 15, but I was granted early access by NetGalley for review consideration. My review: I…