Grade A #AudioBookReview: Trailbreaker by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare + #Giveaway

Posted on February 12, 2026February 10, 2026 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> blog tours> book reviews

Trailbreaker (Prairie Nightingale) by Ruthie Knox, Annie Mare
Narrator: Mia Hutchinson-Shaw
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: domestic thriller, mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Prairie Nightingale #2
Pages: 299
Length: 10 hours and 3 minute
Published by Thomas & Mercer on January 27, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Suspicions that a serial killer is terrorizing a pristine tourist spot draw a single mom and budding private investigator into a twisting and deepening mystery of secrets and murder.

Single mom and newly minted private investigator Prairie Nightingale has opened the doors of her Green Bay, Wisconsin, agency and is ready for work. She and her crew aren’t quite prepared for their first client, Bernie Dubicki, a notorious online journalist and not-altogether-reliable provocateur, who claims the idyllic vacation destination of nearby Door County is home to a serial killer.

She’s pinpointed four seemingly unrelated deaths that haven’t raised suspicions for anyone else. But when a college student vanishes, Bernie’s sizable retainer convinces Prairie to help connect the dots. And trusted, flirty FBI agent Foster Rosemare thinks Bernie might be onto something. Prairie never expected her first investigation to be so big—like Dateline big—but she does have an inquiring mind and a knack for seeing things no one else can.

In this case she’ll have to look deep—not only into the secrets of strangers, but into Door County’s woods—to solve a mystery decades in the making.

My Review:

I had missed the first book in the Prairie Nightingale series, Homemaker, when it came out last year. I have to confess that I probably bounced right off that title and didn’t look more deeply. (I REALLY don’t do domestic.)

BUT, then I saw this tour, and did look more closely at the authors’ names and remembered that I loved both their books (About Last Night for Knox and The Story Guy for Mare writing as Mary Ann Rivers) but hadn’t picked up on anything new in a while. So I went back and picked up Homemaker and I absolutely ADORED it.

Clearly, you can’t judge a book by either its cover OR its title – and I should know better. (Not that I can’t be tempted by an intriguing one or the other.)

Trailbreaker picks up right where Homemaker left off. Well, sorta/kinda. Because it’s been a year for them, and not nearly as productive or profitable a year as they’d hoped. Prairie, Marian, Joyce and Emma started Prairie Hawk Investigations on a high after the successful – if tragic – conclusion of the Radcliffe case in Homemaker.

But they couldn’t use that case as a way of drumming up business. The credit went to law enforcement, and Prairie agreed not to talk about her contribution. A contribution without which the case would NEVER have been solved. But that’s Prairie all over.

Only the people who know about Prairie’s involvement well, know. Along with some people who made it their business to know. And that’s where Bernie Dubicki comes in.

Bernie, an eccentric, wealthy, resident of Door County Wisconsin, KNOWS in her gut that something is wrong in HER county. But she can’t put her finger on exactly what – and neither can the legions of fans who follow her “Back Door” online newsletter and gossip sheet.

But Bernie has money to burn and Prairie Hawk desperately needs a new, paying, client so they can clean the literal mouse poop out of their office. Bernie thinks she’s going to run the investigation and micromanage Prairie Hawk every step of the way, because she’s a steamroller with a bee in her bonnet and that’s pretty much her modus operandi for living.

So she’s not surprised that Prairie Hawk takes her case – after all, her retainer check is going to keep them afloat for months and she knows it. But she is surprised – and eventually (EVENTUALLY!) respectful – when Prairie Nightingale takes the reins. Bernie hired them for their principles. But a LOT of their principles are firmly wrapped in standing their own ground and investigating a case their own way – regardless of what the client demands.

As much as the agency needs Bernie’s money, they’re not willing to compromise themselves or their ethics for it. That ground is hard won for all of them, and they’re not ceding it to a rich woman looking for validation of her pet conspiracy theories.

Which doesn’t mean that Bernie’s wrong about most – if not all of what she’s fixated on. There is something going on – including but not limited to incompetence or rug sweeping or corruption on the part of the Door County Sheriff’s department stretching back decades.

It’s going to take Prairie Hawk Investigations and every single resource they can bring to bear – especially themselves – to unknot the tangled web of coincidences, mysterious thefts, murders ruled accidents, and missing women to get to the heart of what – or who – has gone wrong in Door County’s backwoods.

And the clock is ticking, because the last victim of whatever or whoever this is, is still missing, PRESUMED dead a year after she disappeared. Miray Küçükgenç might still be alive. But the clock is ticking and it’s getting so loud that Prairie herself can’t stop hearing it. She’s determined to bring Miray home – whatever it takes and whoever it takes down along the way.

Escape Rating A: Trailbreaker was even better than Homemaker, which is saying something because I LOVED Homemaker a whole lot. What makes this one better, IMHO, is that Homemaker was, of necessity, a whole lot of setup for the series and for Prairie’s detective agency, Prairie Hawk Investigations.

THIS story is all about their first investigation as an official team. And it’s a doozy. (It was also so damn compelling – or compulsive – that as much as I was REALLY enjoying the audiobook narrated by Mia Hutchinson-Shaw, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing each day’s listen with even more reading. In the end I read as much as I listened. The audio was TERRIFIC, but reading is FAST.)

Part of what captivated me was the way that it grounds itself in what’s gone before while still moving forward. And I’m saying that even though that means that the place where this second book starts is with that ground in a bit of a hard freeze.

Because Prairie Hawk isn’t doing all that well a year after the events in Homemaker – and for reasons that are realistic on multiple levels. It’s not just that Prairie gave away the opportunity to publicize their foundational achievement in the Radcliffe case, but that her need to solve the puzzle, provide closure for the family, and especially to accommodate law enforcement, is very much part and parcel of how women are socialized. She’s expected to step back, and she does even though she already knows she shouldn’t.

And that issue is part of what makes Prairie Hawk’s contracts so stringent when it comes to standing their own ground, because it’s hard for all of them.

Also, for the past year, Prairie has let herself get dragged back into the self-effacing and self-erasing patterns of attending to every domestic crisis in her own household and not training her ex-husband to take the times and dates and responsibilities he AGREED to at the start of the business. The constant interruptions to Prairie’s time and derailments of Prairie’s business plans and work have consumed the agency – and it’s up to her not to keep falling into that.

We understand why she does because those old roles are comfortably familiar (if not always comfortable in any other sense) in a way that being the leader of her own business is not. But she’s exasperated her colleagues to the point where Bernie’s self-motivated intervention drops like a bomb into the middle of Prairie Hawk’s “come-to-Jesus” meeting with Prairie Nightingale about the way her domestic distractions are distracting their entire enterprise.

Which, by a circuitous route, leads back to the mouse poop on the conference room table and the team’s varying, but typical for each individual, reactions to it.

Bernie Dubicki serves as the team’s wake-up call in multiple ways. First and most obvious, she has a case for them, and enough money to make them think more than twice about doing anything other than taking it.

Bernie, herself is actually the biggest drawback to the case, almost but not quite enough to outweigh the size of her bankroll. On the one hand, Bernie’s very up front with the fact that she was looking for an all-woman detective agency that would actually LISTEN to her, because law enforcement clearly is not.

OTOH, Bernie is a steamroller, which is part of why law enforcement isn’t listening to her. If she were a man, her steamroller tendencies would be seen as the strength of conviction, but in a woman it’s all chalked up to over-reacting and a need for attention. (We’ve ALL heard that one before IRL.) At the same time, there’s a clear undercurrent that Bernie knows that Prairie Hawk is desperate for a case, and figures she can steamroller them into investigating HER pet theories and following HER lead and being HER mouthpiece.

So while Bernie’s case is the making of Prairie Hawk Investigation in a lot of ways, this case also prods Bernie into a whole lot of changes of her own. Not so much the making of Bernie as the remaking of Bernie with a bit more understanding of the people around her.

But it’s the case that keeps the reader following along with Prairie, possibly trying to put a foot on an imaginary accelerator for the story every bit as much and as often as Prairie is trying to pump on an imaginary brake when her daughter is driving – after said daughter side-swiped a pedestrian in her first attempt at taking her driving test.

The case is, just as the agency and the story itself are, female-centric, female-forward and female-focused. While it’s the last victim (so far and Prairie’s hoping to keep it that way) that has Prairie’s mom-senses tingling, the whole chain of crimes is not as equal opportunity as it appears on the surface in a really terrible way. Both men and women get robbed and murdered along this criminal’s path. But the men just get killed – the women get abducted and held, somewhere, for days or weeks or in the last case nearly a year so far. All the murders get chalked up to death by misadventure or accident, this missing persons cases get labelled as ‘running away’, but in the case of the women’s murders or disappearances evidence gets outright ignored that doesn’t fit the easiest theory.

It’s up to Prairie and her team to take Bernie’s conspiracy theories and set them aside, while still investigating the individual crimes that stretch back decades, to do the coordination that law enforcement seemingly can’t or won’t. Which they do. And it’s an absolute blast to watch them work, struggle with their internal issues and team-building, and work some more.

And get the job that no one else has managed to do, done. In time to save one missing young woman, while bringing closure to a whole bunch of grieving families AND putting the guilty behind bars.

Two final notes as I close. There’s one thing that nagged at me, and I recognize that it’s very much a ‘me’ thing but still. The ending of Prairie Hawk’s case was just right. It provided the best outcome for the victims and their families, rescuing the girl who could still be rescued, closing out several missing persons cases, providing a kind of emotional restitution to families who were told their loved one had committed suicide when they’d been murdered, etc., etc., along with putting Prairie Hawk Investigations back in the black and hopefully on track.

But I missed a scene I desperately wanted, where all those law enforcement agencies who did a ton of rug sweeping got hauled onto the carpet by someone and accepted – or rejected – delivery of a righteous lecture detailing just how badly they all effed up. Because they did. (Unless, of course, Prairie Hawk’s caseload is going to get built on picking up after law enforcement’s rug sweeping and effing up and in that case never mind.) I still wanted to see that message delivered by someone, even if it had to be FBI Agent Foster Rosemare and his semi-retired intelligence agent dad.

Second, I do enjoy the understated, hesitant, step forward and back romance between Prairie and Foster Rosemare. I’m not saying they should pick up the pace because it feels right this way under their circumstances. But there’s starting to be a feeling that what’s keeping the pace so slow is at least partly the long arm of coincidence inserting interruptions and taking him out of town at critical moments. That long arm can get brittle if it gets too long and starts seeming too coincidental. It’s not there yet but it is getting there. (My two cents and your reading mileage may vary.)

All in very much all in this case, I had an excellent reading/listening time with Prairie Nightingale and Trailbreaker. I wasn’t ready to let this book end at all – no matter how much I raced to find out how it ended. Which means that I’m thrilled that the next book in the series, Believer, is coming in September. I’m already looking forward to it.

I hope I’ve teased you sufficiently that you’ll give Prairie Nightingale’s investigations a try. And if you’d like to take another metaphorical tromp through the Door County backwoods after you finish Trailbreaker, take a look at Annelise Ryan’s Monster Hunter Mysteries, starting with A Death in Door County. Just something to tide you over while, like me, you’re itching for Prairie Hawk’s next case.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

TOUR PARTICIPANTS

February 4 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT

February 5 – Jody’s Bookish Haven – SPOTLIGHT

February 5 – Baroness Book Trove – SPOTLIGHT

February 6 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT

February 7 – MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT

February 7 – StoreyBook Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

February 8 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – SPOTLIGHT

February 9 – Angel’s Book Nook – SPOTLIGHT

February 10 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT

February 10 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW

February 11 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER INTERVIEW

February 12 – Reading Reality – REVIEW

February 12 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

February 13 – Novels Alive – REVIEW

February 14 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading Books – REVIEW

February 15 – The Mystery of Writing – SPOTLIGHT

February 16 – Sarandipity’s – SPOTLIGHT

February 16 – Maureen’s Musings – SPOTLIGHT

February 17 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

A+ #AudioBookReview: Junkyard Riders by Faith Hunter

Posted on January 30, 2026January 29, 2026 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Junkyard Riders (Junkyard Cats #5) by Faith Hunter
Narrator: Khristine Hvam
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, urban fantasy
Series: Shining Smith #5
Pages: 163
Length: 4 hours and 46 minutes
Published by Audible Studios, Lore Seekers Press on January 20, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Shining Smith returns, taking on the “Dark Riders,” a paramilitary group motorcycle gang searching for Gov. political power, military connections, and alien tech. The Dark Riders are closing in on Shining’s secrets and, while she would rather nest in her new roadhouse, Shining must protect her own, once again taking the battle to the enemy.
Unfortunately, CAIT, the original AI on the junkyard’s crashed spaceship, has its own agenda buried in the ship’s code and choses this time to implement it. There is nothing Shining can do to stop it, except what she does best – plot an offensive, get her people in place, and hope Jolene can outsmart the virtual alter ego.
But the cataclysmic snowstorm crashing in with all the power and subtlety of Mateo in his WarBot suit could be the end of them all.

My Review:

There’s a major snowstorm crashing down on Shining’s head in this one – and bloody damn (as Shining herself would put it – I didn’t need the up-close-and-personal reminder of what’s headed my way in real life as it headed towards hers in brilliantly realized fiction.

I’m still here for the cats, six years and four books after the first utterly terrific book in this series, Junkyard Cats. Because Shining and her allies, the more-or-less humans AND the self-proclaimed “destructions of cats” have just gotten bigger and more badass as the series has evolved.

And so have their enemies.

In this fifth entry in the series, the hard-won more-or-less peace that Shining has sacrificed so much blood for, particularly in the previous book, Junkyard Roadhouse, has been disturbed by the advent of an unnamed motorcycle gang that Shining calls the “Dark Riders”. She’s sure they have a name, she just doesn’t know what it is – yet. She just knows that these “Dark Riders” are in the sex trafficking business and don’t care who they have to kill in order to get their “stock” or how willing they might be to “serve”. The Dark Riders are threatening territory that is under the protection of Shining and/or her allies, and have now turned their sights on the Junkyard Roadhouse. Not directly, not yet, but attempting to pick off some of their more remote trading partners.

Which Shining cannot allow, both as the threat to her independence that it definitely is, and because some of her own people are on site. And mostly because she promised protection so now she’s duty bound to deliver it.

That her enemy is a whole lot bigger and more powerful than even rival queen Clarice Warhammer in Junkyard War just means that Shining is going to need a lot more allies to help take them down. Even if this time around she’s putting herself directly against the Gov and their military forces.

Especially if it’s the Gov and their military. She’ll just have to be a bit sneakier about how she brings them down. Or out. Or into the bright, shining light of exposure.

Even if bringing down a bigger and more powerful – and connected – foe is a good deed that is guaranteed not to go unpunished. That’s a problem for ‘later’ Shining, if she survives this time around. Which she bloody damn WILL.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve adored this series from that very first book, Junkyard Cats, and I haven’t changed my mind one bit as the series has continued. In fact, I think they’ve gotten better as they’ve gone along. They’ve certainly gotten bigger – not necessarily in length but in scope. With each book we see more of how this effed up future is, well, effed up. And it’s FUBAR, glorious and terrible all at the same time.

In my personal opinion, it’s also better in audio, but that’s a shade of better that’s really, really close. Narrator Kristine Hvam remains the perfect voice of Shining, she’s gritty and snarky, self-deprecating and over-confident, desperate and determined, always, always picking herself up off the ground to DEAL WITH IT whatever IT might be.

She makes hard decisions, lives with the even harder consequences, and Hvam’s voice perfectly captures Shining’s first-person, internal voice every step of the way. The one problem I have with the narration being just so damn good is that now that the ebooks are released simultaneously with the audio, I’m caught very sharply on the horns of the dilemma of whether I want to hear Shining’s voice more than I’m desperate to find out what happened.

It’s a bloody damn hard call every time. But that’s Shining Smith all over.

This entry in the series reads like the set up for the next phase of Shining’s ‘adventures’ – to use that term very loosely. Alternatively, it’s the opening campaign in Shining’s next war. Because she is at war. In the first three books (Junkyard Cats, Junkyard Bargain, Junkyard War), she was at war with rival queen Clarice Warhammer. The previous book, Junkyard Roadhouse, represented a consolidation of the gains and alliances Shining gathered for and as a result of Warhammer’s destruction.

Those gains included a lot of intel on bad actors in what passes for the US government in this post-apocalyptic dystopia, and that intel has led her to a bigger, better equipped enemy. Taking on the Gov, even in the clandestine fashion she does in this story, is going to take more than one book and a whole lot more firepower. Those Dark Riders are the tip of an iceberg that goes a lot deeper and further than even Shining and her tendency to imagine worst-case scenarios had imagined.

On the surface, Junkyard Riders is another fantastic Shining Smith adventure, for multiple definitions of the word ‘adventure’. It’s also the latest chapter in an ongoing saga that gets bigger as it goes – even though the length of the individual entries is still relatively short. On my third hand (and some of Shining’s allies actually have such a thing), this story represents both an expansion and an escalation in the best ‘Old Skool’ urban fantasy tradition. At the end of every story, Shining takes her bow with more resources, more weapons, more POWER than she had at the beginning. Which forces her next enemy to match and exceed her in order to have a shot at taking her down.

This entry in the series was fantastic AND did a fantastic job of setting up the next book. Hopefully this time next year if not, fingers crossed, just a bit sooner. Because I’m already there for it.

One final note because I can’t resist. A ‘destruction of cats’ is a collective noun for a group of wild and/or feral cats. The junkyard’s cats are not exactly feral, but they certainly are both wild AND destructive. Tufts, the queen of the junkyard’s cats, took that name for her clowder HERSELF. Because of course she did. And her Destruction has certainly earned the moniker. I can’t wait to see how THAT works out in the books to come. Because I’ve always been all in on this series for the cats. And they get more badass every book – right along with Shining Smith herself.

A- #AudioBookReview: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire

Posted on January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Through Gates of Garnet and Gold (Wayward Children, #11) by Seanan McGuire
Narrator: Cynthia Hopkins
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, portal fantasy, urban fantasy, young adult
Series: Wayward Children #11
Pages: 149
Length: 4 hours and 33 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tordotcom on January 6, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A fan-favorite character returns in this action-packed instalment of the Hugo Award-winning Wayward Children series.
After Nancy was cast out of the Halls of the Dead and forced to enroll at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children, she never believed she'd find her door again, and when she did, she didn't look back. She disappeared from the school to resume her place in the Halls, never intending to return.
Years have passed. A darkness has descended on the Halls, and the living statues who populate them are dying at the hands of the already dead. The Lord and Lady who rule the land are helpless to stop the slaughter, forcing Nancy to leave the Halls again, this time on purpose, as she attempts to seek much-needed help from her former schoolmates.
But who would volunteer to quest in a world where the dead roam freely?
And why are the dead so intent on adding to their number?

My Review:

Whenever I think of the Wayward Children series, I imagine of the chase scene from Monsters, Inc. that takes place in the vast, cavernous space where all the doors are stored. I want to see a place just like that in this series – but I KNOW that the doors that these wayward children go through, sometimes back through, and very occasionally stride through one more time – or even more – aren’t stored that way.

Because the doors in this series have way more sentience of their own than that.

Nancy’s story turns out to be the rarest of all. Once upon a time she left our world for the stillness of the Halls of the Dead, stumbled back through her door to this world in Every Heart A Doorway, but found her door again at the end of that story and returned to the place her heart called home – a life of quiet, still, contemplation in the Halls of the Dead.

At least until the hungry dead start eating her friends, the other living statues, and the Lady of the Dead uses her powers to shove Nancy back through the doors to this world, specifically back to the one place where she hopes that Nancy can find help for whatever has gone wrong in the Halls.

That door leads to Nancy’s old room at Miss West’s School – and it is a place where Nancy can indeed find help and succor. Even though the provision of that help is certain to break Miss West’s one supposedly hard and fast rule – “NO QUESTS”

Of course there will be a quest to save the place their friend’s heart calls home. All their hearts are already in it. Because, even though they don’t know it yet, that this particular quest was theirs all along.

Escape Rating A-: This series opened with Nancy’s story in Every Heart A Doorway, and it feels right and fitting that the story return to Nancy yet again. Not for an ending – or at least I surely hope not – but for a bit of a catch-up. A catch-up with where and how Nancy is that ends on a surprisingly open note because Nancy’s story is clearly not over. So hopefully the series isn’t either.

I listened to this entry in the series, and the narration was lovely. The narrators in this series switch depending on which of the children is the focus and whether their world is a ‘logic world’ or a ‘nonsense world. Cynthia Hopkins voiced Nancy’s first story, Every Heart A Doorway, and also voiced another logic world story in the series, In an Absent Dream. She did a particularly excellent job with Nancy’s voice and with all of the voices this time around, even nonsense-oriented Sumi as she reacts, lampshades and occasionally outright subverts the norms of this world that is antithetical to her very nature.

Then again, sometimes they need it.

Nancy is one of the long-standing, frequently appearing, characters in this series, so it’s not surprising that her – and everyone’s – equally long-standing nemesis appears in this story as well. After all, this is a universe where in the right worlds behind the right doors, the dead can rise again.

Which at first seems to be the story here. What made that story interesting, at first, was that the dead who are the foundation of the Halls of the Dead do, in fact, have cause to rise. They have been neglected and ignored if not outright mistreated. The Lord of the Dead has retreated to his private chambers and has begun to think of himself as a god and not merely the genius loci of this particular world.

What – or who – has stirred the dead up so destructively is not of his world, it’s of ours. And it’s up to someone – or several someones – to help lay that evil to rest yet again. Because the children have met this particular hungry dead before – and quite likely will again because they are unlikely to rest for long.

The danger of the quest is real, because the dead are very, very hungry AND they have a grudge. Well, one of them does. So there’s a lot of chasing and racing and pounding hearts and feet in a place that has formerly known only stillness.

But the part that lingers of this story isn’t the quest or even the enemy they face – not that their enemy isn’t likely to linger, but that’s what this particular enemy has become infamous for. It’s not new although it does keep everyone on the edge of their toes every step of the way.

What lingers is Nancy’s insight into someone who has been both a hero and a figure of worship and reverence to her. She thought she was sure that the Halls where where she belonged. Her discovery that her hero isn’t remotely the hero she thought he was, that the Lord of the Dead has feet of clay up to his knees, might just have the power to change her mind.

Or at least make her much, much less sure. And that’s what the reader, and Nancy, are left with at the end. The possibility of change, and the recognition that her heart might call her elsewhere. Perhaps even back to Miss West’s, where a piece of her heart has been waiting for her all along.

I can’t wait for the next (very much hoped for) entry in this series, so that I can find out what happens next!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Architect of New York by Javier Moro, translated by Peter J. Hearn

Posted on January 15, 2026January 14, 2026 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Architect of New York by Javier Moro
Translator: Peter J. Hearn
Narrator: Robert Fass
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, historical fiction, memoir
Pages: 352
Length: 12 hours and 33 minutes
Published by Brilliance Audio, Counterpoint on January 6, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A transportive work of historical fiction chronicling the life, loves, and larger-than-life successes of Rafael Guastavino, an influential yet largely forgotten Spanish architect of New York’s Gilded Era
Iconoclast. Genius. Womanizer. Architect Rafael Guastavino’s signature vaulted tile ceilings revolutionized Gilded Age New York City. The Oyster Bar in Grand Central, the Prospect Park Boathouse, and the iconic Old City Hall subway stop, number among his masterpieces. But while his works continue to imbue the city with the glamor of a bygone era, the man himself has been largely forgotten. Until now.
Told through the eyes of Guastavino’s son and business partner, Javier Moro’s magnetic prose brings to life the remarkable rags-to-riches journey of this influential immigrant family. Guastavino was a stubborn man, enamored of his own sense of destiny, but he was also a deeply compassionate father, as committed to his family as he was to his work, and equally defined by his successes in the latter realm as by his failures in the former.
Set against historical events including the Chicago World's Fair and the sinking of the Titanic, The Architect of New York is a moving and entertaining father-son story filled with finely developed and deeply researched real-life characters (including figures like Stanford White) that captures the glamor and drama of a bygone era while offering a perrenial glimpse into the human heart.

My Review:

They called him “the architect of New York” in his New York Times obituary dated February 2, 1908. And he was. Or rather, THEY were. The title in the obituary, at the time it was written, referred to the elder Guastavino, Rafael Guastavino Moreno, but even then it could have referred to either Rafael Guastavino, the father or the son he named for himself and trained to be his protegee, his right-hand man, and his shadow.

As told in this fictionalized biography/autobiography, not even the two Rafaels Guastavino could tell where the one ended and the other began. And by the end of this story, it’s clear that, as much as he might have wanted to stand apart from his father as a young man, once his beloved father was gone he wished he’d never been forced to discover where that line was drawn.

The story reads as if it was intended to be a biography of the older Guastavino. But that biography is written as if from the perspective of the younger, and he tells his own story just as much – if not at points a bit more – than he does his father’s. After all, he knows his own story better AND remembers what he thought and felt as the events he witnessed actually happened.

His father was often a closed book, partly because this story begins when the younger Guastavino, called Rafaelito to distinguish him from the larger-than-life persona of his father, was merely nine years old. A boy, recently immigrated to the United States, with his parents and his older sisters, in the midst of his family tearing itself apart due to stresses that he was, at the time, too young to understand.

But also, and more prominently as Rafaelito’s story continues and he grows in maturity and understanding, because the bits of his father’s life in their native Spain that his father reluctantly reveals over the years contains a great deal of truly messy embarrassments and outright scandals, and the father doesn’t want to tarnish the worship in his son’s eyes.

As much as Guastavino senior had been at the (first) height of his career as an architect and builder when he fled Spain for America on borrowed – and possibly swindled – money, as a human being he was a bit of a louse. More than a bit when it came to his relationships with women.

Part of Rafaelito’s growing up included the discovery that his mother was not his father’s wife, that older his sisters were his half-sisters AND that he had older half-brothers (sons of his father’s first and at the time legal wife) that he’d never met, that the woman in New York City who loved him like a mother couldn’t legally marry his father, and that dear old dad cheated on her, too, repeatedly.

Senior also sent the family – however untraditionally it was constituted – into desperate financial straits over and over again because he could not manage money to save either his soul or whatever building company he was operating at the time.

He always meant well, but he didn’t always do well – at least not personally. Professionally, Guastavino senior was a bit of a dreamer – but he was often right and always visionary. His ability to execute those visions, when he was forced to rely on others outside himself, was hampered by his inability to see the way the world really worked.

But his buildings assuredly did – beautifully so – and in many cases, still do.

The elder Guastavino’s story is a compelling one. It’s a riches to rags to riches to rags to riches story told from the perspective of a person who knew him intimately, shared his life, his work, his profession and his company – and loved him much too much to have anything like an unbiased opinion on anything to do with the man he saw as larger than life until long after the end of it.

That their identities became so intertwined that the many, many buildings they created or helped to create, including parts of Vanderbilt’s famous Biltmore Estate, the Boston Public Library, the Spanish Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and several glorious and iconic New York City Subway Stations are now often credited to the company they shared rather than either of them individually.

So, in the process of telling his father’s story, a labor of love for a man now old enough to look back and see a bit more of his father’s truth, Rafael Guastavino, Jr. also does a heartfelt and heart wrenching job of telling his own.

Guastavino Vault in the Boston Public Library Entrance TODAY

Escape/Reality Rating A: To quote Mark Twain, one of the elder Guastavino’s contemporaries, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” The story that Rafaelito tells in The Architect of New York is so wild that it seems over the top at many points – and yet it’s all based on the known facts of the man’s life and the work that he – and his son – left behind all over New York City, most of the Eastern Seaboard and all the way across the country.

Which is why this is both an Escape and a Reality rating. As a reader/listener (mostly listener), I certainly escaped into this story. As someone fascinated with history, that the bones of this story are both true and not well known made for a delightful voyage of discovery. The Guastavino designs remain gorgeous examples of New York City’s Gilded Age and Art Deco periods, with their sweeping vaulted ceilings and glorious ceramic tilework.

At the same time, because this is a fictionalized version of a real life it’s difficult to separate what happened from how it’s being told. I both don’t want to critique the man’s actual life – but I also do because his personal life was, to put it in 21st century terms, a hot mess. One of his own making, at that. While he didn’t actually marry all of the women involved, he did also kind of bypass bigamy on the way to trigamy – just not in a legal sense which would have gotten him in even more hot water than he was already in up to his neck.

By telling the story through Rafaelito it allows the author to put a bit of gauze over the lens of objectivity, and also puts the focus more on the work they did together. It turns the story of a truly wild life into a story about the relationship between fathers and sons, the relationship between the immigrant generation and the more formally educated second generation, and, in a business sense, the relationship between the hard driven founding generation and the softer, more privileged generation that comes after them. Those stories, those relationships, are universal and are beautifully explored here.

Rafaelito’s later-in-life reflections on just how much he STILL misses his father, on how much he regrets their frequent arguments, how heartbreakingly often he wishes he could go back in time and tell his father how much he loved him just once more, will bring tears to the eyes of anyone with a heart – especially those who lost their own fathers before they had a chance to realize everything they would miss.

The Architect of New York is a beautiful, absorbing LOT of a story. The audio, read by Robert Fass, was also very well done. Something in the narrator’s voice allowed me to sink right into the story, and that was just right as the story is more than dramatic enough to the point that too much vocal embellishment would take away from it.

In the end, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book, both for its story and for its peek into the Gilded Age and turn of 20th century America, as well as for its tale of love and independence and fathers and sons. If you enjoy stories of fascinating characters with big dreams, even bigger accomplishments, and feet of clay up to the knees, it’s a compelling journey from beginning to end.

One final note; Throughout my absorption in this book, as I listened to the narrator there was a song running through my head. The song, which has reached earworm status and I can’t get it out, is “Leader of the Band” by Dan Fogelberg. Because, the story in that song, the story of Fogelberg’s love for his own father and appreciation of his legacy, may refer to a different shared profession but is very much the same story. A story about a son whose life “has been a poor attempt to imitate the man” and feels as though he’s “just a living legacy” to the father he loved and worshiped.

#AudioBookReview: A Ruin Great and Free by Cadwell Turnbull

Posted on December 30, 2025January 6, 2026 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | audio reviews> audiobooks> B+ Reviews> book reviews

A Ruin, Great and Free (Convergence Saga, #3) by Cadwell Turnbull
Narrator: Dion Graham
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, science fiction, urban fantasy
Series: Convergence Saga #3
Pages: 374
Length: 10 hours and 29 minutes
Published by Blackstone Publishing on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.
It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?
Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon—and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.

My Review:

First, this was wow. And second, and third, and as it turns out, fourth. Not always a cohesive wow, but a wow all the same.

It’s also the conclusion to an epic whose whole is DEFINITELY greater than the sum of its parts. But you really need the parts – and if it’s been awhile a refresher on the parts, No Gods, No Monsters and We Are the Crisis – to help you make this ‘fracture’ of the multiverse cohere into something like a single story.

Because the story is considerably larger than the page count of the books would suggest.

From some perspectives – and there are plenty to choose from – this is a story about otherness and equality and justice and activism to bring about the last three for the first. While it uses literal monsters, werewolves and vampires and invisible people and magic users, as metaphors for otherness, it does not shy away from equating ‘being a monster’ with being ‘other’ on any axis that we already use to separate people, including but absolutely not limited to race, gender or gender representation, sexual preference or the lack thereof, socioeconomic class, immigration status, ethnicity, etc., etc., and truly ad nauseum.

Humans seem to actively search for axes on which they can divide themselves (all sharp puns equally intended) so they can class ‘others’ by any definition as ‘less than.’ So that their own group can be ‘more than.’ You might think that’s a digression but it’s NOT. The exploitation of this phenomenon is the heart of the story.

At least one of the hearts. It’s a monster, it has more than one.

At the same time – and very much the man, wizard, god, whatever behind the curtain – this is a story at the intersection of “God created mankind in his own image,” the reverse, which is that humanity creates gods in its own image, and the Yiddish proverb that goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Because this is where the story comes together in the literal sense, as the one and many deus ex machina (dei ex machina?) who have been maneuvering humanity and its monsters and monstrousness from behind the scenes on all the worlds of the multiverse. (We’re only closely observing two and it’s plenty to get the flavor of the mess they’re dealing with.)

If humanity creates gods in its own image, whether to explore the world, explain the world, excuse the way the world works or cope with the things it doesn’t understand, what would a god do with those same questions?

It might, and in this case it did, create gods and god-like beings in its own image to allow it to observe its world from a perspective outside its own. But the beings it creates would also be gods. Who would also want to create, cope with, and control, their own worlds and circumstances and destinies.

With humanity caught in the crossfire. And that is the other heart of this story, that conflict of purpose and explanation between gods. It’s not a conflict between good and evil per se, but a conflict between gods who believe that the universe that created them is a fascinating thing to explore, control and contain as much as they can, vs those that believe that the universe they can’t control is an enemy that must be destroyed.

The story in this concluding book in the trilogy reveals that all the sides of what could be a terrible equation have been manipulated by gods, the agents of the Cult of the Zsouvox who have created both the monsters in the human population and the movement that has demonized them in order to sow chaos and bring about destruction, while the smaller, quieter, Order of Asha opposes the Cult, moving their human agents as more-or-less willing pawns on their giant chessboard, trying to bring about a possibility that the universe, the Order, humanity, and the gods themselves, all survive. Together.

It’s a slim chance, but it’s the only one they’ve got.

Escape Rating B+: I picked this up for the purpose of listening to it. I could listen to Dion Graham read the worst book in the universe. An old phone book. All the grocery lists. Anything. There were points where I got so caught up in the voice that I was mesmerized – a definite danger as I listen while driving.

There are a LOT of threads to, not exactly unravel because things have already thoroughly unraveled, but ‘ravel’ in this concluding book. The two worlds that we are invested in – or rather we’re invested in the characters (AND WE ARE!) on two different versions of Earth are in the midst of trauma after trauma, and the pace hasn’t let up ever.

In the world most like ours, the Earth of No Gods, No Monsters – even though we now know there are PLENTY of both – the monsters who survived their “Boston Massacre” have found a slice of peace in a remote, intentional, sanctuary community supported by the Order of Asha. A sanctuary that is about to be breached by the Black Hand agents of the Cult of the Zsouvox. Their story is wrapped around questions of standing to defend what they’ve built or escaping to hide in yet another protected shadow in the hopes that they can outrun or outlive the Cult. A decision that is made for them by the Order of Asha informing them that they either stand here or lose the whole multiverse.

(This side of the story, about the risks, rewards and costs of constant activism no matter the cause, has a surprising readalike in We Will Rise Again with its collection of stories and essays that reckon with activism through both fiction and nonfiction, because damn but this is a fictional tour-de-force of the same told in a fascinating, multi-threaded story over multiple times and places and corners of the multiverse.)

The story in another corner of the multiverse, twenty-five years after their “Massacre of Men” by invading aliens aligned with the Cult of the Zsouvox whether they know it or not (honestly I’m not sure) is focused on the manipulators of their own world who see the crisis coming but are trying to fend it off in ways that more or less align with the Order of Asha. (This side of the story is directly related to the author’s first book, The Lesson. While I had enough to empathize with the characters and their dilemma from We Are the Crisis, I wasn’t quite as invested because I didn’t have enough background.)

All of that being said, this book, this series, is a lot. It’s beyond compelling because of the way that it’s using fantasy and science fiction to tell a story that’s really, paraphrasing the original, about human’s inhumanity to other humans. Because the real monsters are just us. The story does make me wonder if we can save ourselves without the intervention of one – or more – deus ex machina who can see us for what we are – because humans as a species have clearly got some problems with that.

By putting the story – just as the gods in this story put their own questions – into a scenario outside ourselves, it does what SF does when it’s at the top of its game. It holds up a mirror to society as it is to show both what is and what could be. And that’s what I’m taking away from this read.

However, I’m really glad that I have copies of all three books and audiobooks for this one. Because the way that the end turns itself around and explains or at least informs every single thing that has happened from the very beginning means that this fascinating and fantastic trilogy is going to be even better – and become a more cohesive and comprehensive story – on a second read/listen. Right after I read and/or listen to the author’s first book, The Lesson, now that I know it’s just a bit of a prequel – in other words, this Convergence Saga converges with that universe. I’m looking forward to starting over – at the beginning of the beginning – to see where it all leads now that I think I know all the players. That I’ll probably discover that I don’t is absolutely part of my fascination with this entire saga.

#AudioBookReview: Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum, translated by Shanna Tan

Posted on December 26, 2025December 25, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews

Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-reum
Translator: Shanna Tan
Narrator: Rosa Escoda
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, essays, memoir
Pages: 240
Length: 3 hours and 49 minutes
on December 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop comes a warm and reflective collection of essays inviting us to reflect on our relationship with reading.
Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure?
Rarely do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading. In each of the essays in Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.
Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encouraging book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Lifelong and new readers will take away something from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within.

My Review:

I was SO tempted to begin this review with snark – and just keep right on snarking all the way through. Obviously, I chose to begin with a bit of snark, because, well, I do too. Read every day, that is. Reading is life.

Not ALL of life, but a lot of life, and all of my life has been filled with books and reading. So I picked this up with a lot of empathy for the writer, because from an outside perspective we’re coming from a similar place. From the inside perspective provided by this book, clearly not – and not just the obvious differences of age, location and pretty much everything else except gender.

We may both read every day, but we don’t read the same, either the same things or the same way or for (most) of the same reasons.

But I agree wholeheartedly with something the author says in THIS book, that “Books are like a spider’s web: you’ll only get more attached.” We’re both clearly enmeshed, we’re both biblioholics, and neither of us ever plans on getting treatment for the condition.

I know I wouldn’t have it any other way. After reading Every Day I Read, I believe that the author feels the same.

Reality Rating B: This one doesn’t get an escape rating because I didn’t – which was kind of the point of it. (I often found myself talking back to the excellent audio while listening in the car.) I was looking to read a book by someone who reads A LOT and lives a chunk of their life in and through books. (I also found this book through a fellow reading addict’s article about the book intending to get even more people hooked on the joy of reading. This whole reading thing is addictive!)

One of the ways in which the author and I read differently is that the author loves to collect quotations from the books she reads. Collecting the quotes is part of her process of reading and jotting them down is part of her process of, well, processing and understanding the books she’s read. (Sometimes things stick with me, but it’s not what I’m there for.)

I’m going to use one of her examples as a way of furthering my response to the book. This quote is her quote from Lee Kwonwoo’s book, Learning to Write Begins with Reading a Book, “The focus isn’t on the book, but on the reader, and your experience reading it.” in regards to a reader’s response to a book as opposed to a professional book critic’s response or review.

And that’s what this “review” is intending to be, my response, as a reader, to this book about her thoughts about the reading life, the reading experience, and ways that others can themselves become habitual readers.

From this reader’s perspective, there’s a difference between getting pleasure out of reading vs. reading for pleasure – and I think the author and I are on opposite sides of that divide. She clearly does receive a great deal of pleasure from her reading – but her process is, well, definitely a PROCESS. Like the quotes. Or setting a timer so as to read a certain number of minutes each day. Or it could simply be that all the books she references and quotes from are all “improving” in some way – either they are classics, they are literary fiction, or they are nonfiction.

Telling humans to do ANYTHING because they “should” is not a way to get people to do something. Telling people they would love the classics if they just gave them another chance is not a message that’s going to resonate with as many people as “if you need an escape from the crisis of the day this will let you leave it behind for a bit.”

Reading itself is the pleasure and the escape, and some days a cozy mystery is just what the “book” doctor ordered. It doesn’t have to be “good” from a literary perspective or impart a particular lesson. “Fiction is (still) the lie through which we tell the truth,” to quote philosopher Albert Camus, and that’s just as true for a so-called trashy romance or a sweeping epic fantasy as it is the highest of highbrow literary fiction.

Your reading mileage may vary. The author of this book’s certainly seems to.

Here’s the point where I get up on my soapbox, because I need to let this out. There’s an essay in this book about ebooks, and it pretty much parrots all the negative stuff that gets repeated that reading an ebook isn’t “as good” as reading print. I have problems with this. In fact, I have LOTS of problems with this.

The study that was used as justification for this pronouncement compared readers’ behavior (by tracking eye movement) when reading “web pages” with readers’ behavior when reading a printed book. That is an apples to oranges comparison. Back in the days when print was all we had, readers didn’t read newspapers or magazine articles the same way they read books – because those things are not the same. So I wouldn’t expect readers’ behavior to be the same and whoever created the study shouldn’t have either unless they were looking for proof of a point they had already decided on.

Second, and more important from my personal perspective, is that the all the articles that “prove” that reading ebooks is somewhat less real or less true or simply a lesser experience than reading print books just cuts off vast swaths of readers from continuing to read once the inevitable vision changes of middle age – and older – set in. While large print books have existed for decades, the number and types of books that are published in large print have always been limited. (Specifically, I read fantasy and science fiction and the amount of either genre that is published in large print is vanishingly small. Without ebooks, I’d have had to give up the genres I have loved for my entire reading life.) This is not the way to keep people who love reading reading.

To put it another way, all that the articles and essays that denigrate ebook reading do is shame readers who read ebooks for whatever reason. As a librarian, shaming the reader for their reading preferences is anathema.

Stepping down off my soapbox now to conclude by answering a question the author poses in her essays about reading books that change one’s life. My own answer explains my passion when it comes to ebooks by reaching back into my early days as a lover of reading. When I was 8 years old someone loaned me a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, with the promise that if I liked it and more importantly returned it, there were MORE. That one book was the right book at the right time to influence all of my reading for the sixty years and counting that have followed. It was the right book at the right time in that it swept me away into a vast, fully realized and utterly absorbing world filled with characters that touched me and made me think and feel, that it told a story that STILL resonates all these years later, and that grew with me as I grew up and reread it and got more and deeper into it each and every time.

It doesn’t matter whether the book that changes or influences your life is the most literate, or the most improving, or the most popular or the most highly thought of or most award winning. What matters is that it works for you. And that if you haven’t already found it, it’s still out there waiting for you to discover it.

A- #AudioBookReview: You Better Not Pout by Mia Sosa

Posted on December 24, 2025December 21, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

You Better Not Pout (Home Sweet Holidays) by Mia Sosa
Narrator: Andre Santana, Gisela Chípe
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy, second chance romance
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #4
Pages: 51
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A freshly broken-up couple agrees to grin and bear it for their family’s sake in a story about the healing power of the holidays from Mia Sosa, USA Today bestselling author of The Worst Best Man.

Juliana and Eric called off their engagement—but Christmas with the family is just around the corner, so things are going to get awkward, fast. Unless, of course, they pretend the wedding is still on. But the holidays are gonna holiday. And the only thing harder than pretending they’re still in love is trying not to fall for each other all over again.

Mia Sosa’s You Better Not Pout is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

If the title of this one sounds familiar, there’s an excellent reason. The title is a line from one of the truly classic Christmas songs that has been playing everywhere since, well, Halloween. Because “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on Christmas Eve, which is TONIGHT.

The song has been recorded by over 200 artists from Bing Crosby to Lady Gaga. You’ve undoubtedly heard somebody sing it sometime this holiday season. And probably every holiday season before and every one after.

Santa Claus may, or may not, be coming to Juliana and Eric this year. Because they’ve been naughty.

Technically, that’s not true. Or at least it hasn’t been true until the holidays. They’ve decided not to go through with their engagement. They’ve realized they STILL love each other, but that they just aren’t the right person for each other.

The naughtiness is in deciding to fake their engagement through those same holidays so as not to upset her family’s just barely righted applecart. Again, not for any nefarious reasons, just that her mother has been ill for a lot of the year, she’s just recovered, and Juliana doesn’t want to put this stress on her just when she’s feeling better.

Equally true, Juliana doesn’t want to spend the entire holiday being the center of her nosy family’s intrusive attention – and it’s hard to blame her for that. The stress of the holidays is enough without every single person in your family wanting to know what YOU did wrong and offering endless reams of unsolicited, unwelcome but utterly well-meaning advice on how to fix things.

The problem with Juliana and Eric’s deal – that he agree to fake their engagement for the holidays with her family in return for Juliana’s agreement to let him have sole possession of their rent-controlled apartment in the breakup – is twofold. Or maybe that’s three-fold. There are a LOT of folding problems, as they need to fold, together, into Juliana’s old bedroom with its too small bed for the duration of their visit. A bed that is both too close for comfort and not nearly close enough, as they both still have feelings and DEFINITELY still have chemistry.

But the real stumbling block to pulling off this deception is the same thing that also saves them. OTOH, Juliana’s family knows both of them entirely too well not to pick up that there’s something wrong. And on the other, Juliana and Eric don’t know each other half as well as think they do – or as they should.

And that’s a situation they can fix – if they’re both willing to listen, even amid the chaos of a big, LOUD, family celebration. If they can just catch a bit of quiet amid that chaos, they have a chance to make things right. They just have to hear each other over all the noise of the holidays. And the relatives.

Escape Rating A-: In the original blurb for the Home Sweet Holidays collection, we were promised cookies. There have been no cookies, but the stories have all been sweet holiday treats just the same.

Even if the treats in this particular story are Puerto Rican pasteles that are as savory as they are sweet. Which is just right for this final story in the series, as the problems that Juliana and Eric are facing definitely have the savor of reality in more ways than one – starting with the issue of splitting that New York City rent-stabilized apartment.

I listened to this story and, as is usual in this collection the narrators were EXCELLENT. The thing is that I picked it up in the middle of reading The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah because I was looking for a story that would be a bit lighter throughout. At the point I was reading, I knew there was an HEA coming but the going was a big tough for the characters. That story is titled “Eight Heartbreaks” for a reason.

While You Better Not Pout is a bit lighter, if only because Juliana and Eric haven’t had enough time to pack THAT MUCH heavy emotional baggage between them, on the surface at least, the issues between Juliana and Eric are VERY similar to the issues between Evelyn and David in their romance. Under that surface, Juliana and Evelyn are coming from different places, but the way their respective traumas manifest is the same. They both bury themselves in work because it soothes their anxieties.

The difference is that Evelyn is a workaholic to avoid feeling her own feelings, while Juliana is a workaholic because it gives her a sense of safety and security. That if she earns her own money then no one can take it away from her or hold it over her head the way that her father did with her mother.

None of which is remotely obvious to Eric. He just sees that she’s too busy, too frantic and too overburdened to live her life – so it’s living her. She has no boundaries with her bosses but plenty with everyone else and its not working for either of them.

At the same time, Eric keeps trying to fix things FOR HER instead of letting her tell him what’s really going on inside her head. He means well, he’s trying really hard, but he’s barking up the wrong tree to mix metaphors completely. (Not that there’s not a literal tree in this story because it’s Christmas and of course there is.)

All of which means that their relationship – and the problems in it – felt very real. That this holiday romance, while it takes place over the short span of the Christmas holidays, is really working from two plus years of relationship history, made the rather quick holiday story have more than enough depth for them to earn their Happy Ever After.

Which made this a terrific story to wrap up this sweet – and just a bit savory – Home Sweet Holidays collection of sweet holiday romance treats!

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum by Valerie Wilson Wesley

Posted on December 17, 2025December 16, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum (A Harriet Stone Mystery) by Valerie Wilson Wesley
Narrator: Diana Blue
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Harlem Renaissance, historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Harriet Stone Mystery #1
Pages: 224
Length: 6 hours and 42 minutes
Published by Dreamscape Media, Kensington Books on December 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.
1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.
It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.
Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.
What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction. . . .

My Review:

It’s the mystery of Junetta Plum’s whole, entire life that confuses, empowers, inspires and enables the life that her cousin Harriet Stone drops into in the opening pages of this book. Not that Harriet doesn’t find herself poking into Junetta’s death – because it is mysterious – but it’s Harriet’s amateur, informal, two-steps-forward-one-step-back investigation into her cousin’s whole entire life that pushes this story forward – and very nearly drops it, and Harriet, in their tracks.

Harriet Stone arrives in Jazz Age Harlem at the end of her emotional tether. Literally, as her once close family in Hartford Connecticut is gone, dead of illness or accident or misadventure or the ravages of the Spanish Flu epidemic. In her mid-20s, unmarried and still grieving her dead fiancé, responsible for her young, mixed-race, adopted sister Lovey, Harriet sees the invitation from her cousin Junetta to come to Harlem and live with her as a lifeline. It’s a chance to make a clean break and a fresh start. An opportunity to live the life that she’s read about in publications like The Crisis and The New Negro.

So she takes a gamble and travels with Lovey to New York City, reaching out to take the hand of a family member she never knew she had but hopes to get to know.

She’ll never get that chance. The morning after Harriet and Lovey’s late arrival, Junetta is dead on the floor of her Harlem mansion, a knife through her heart. The police, unwilling to bother investigating the death of a black woman – even a wealthy one – declare Junetta’s death a suicide in spite of just how unlikely that is.

Harriet is left with Junetta’s entire estate along with a whole lot of questions and not many answers. Everyone around her is keeping secrets – and some of those secrets are Junetta’s. Some are illegal, some are immoral, and some are just the cost of getting by as a black woman in a white man’s world.

The question that Harriet has to resolve before she can move on with her life in a dead woman’s house is the riddle of which of those secrets – and whose – got Junetta Plum killed. And whether that secret has the tenacity to reach out from the grave to harm Harriet, Lovey, or any of the people that Harriet has just begun to call dear.

Escape Rating A+: This is probably the most ‘mixed feelings’ A+ I’ve ever given a book. The A+ is because I absolutely loved this story. I got caught up in the audio from the very beginning and was just riveted. At the same time, I was enjoying the narrator so much that I didn’t want to rush through her reading. Diana Blue came to represent Harriet for me to the point that I heard her voice even when I read for myself.

But the story didn’t feel like a mystery. There’s a mystery in it, but that mystery felt like it was considerably more about Junetta’s life than her death and most of the time it didn’t seem as if Harriet’s investigation was driving the plot. What drove the plot for me was the slice of Harriet’s life, her introduction to the city, the way she slowly made her own way, the friends she made and the people who made her common sense and ‘mother wit’ raise the hair on the back of her neck.

I felt like I was reading about Harriet’s life, and that her investigation into Junetta’s life and death was just a part of Harriet’s story. As I was listening/reading, the story felt considerably more like historical fiction than it did mystery.

And what it felt was REAL. An in-depth portrait of a time and place as seen through the eyes of someone living it. The different women’s perspectives from different generations, made the narrative and the time period shine.

From a personal perspective, I think I got so immersed in this story because it’s told from Harriet’s first person perspective and everything about the story focuses on the women who are “trying to make a way in this hard old world,” as Junetta herself put it. The story is focused on women’s lives, women’s friendships – and enemy-ships – women’s problems and women picking up the pieces. The way that the story dove deeply into Harriet’s life, the difficulties that she and the women around her live with because they are black and because they are female, made it easy for this reader to walk a mile or two of Harlem in the 1920s with them in spite of our differences in time, place, race and circumstances.

If this had been written from the perspective of one of the male characters, I think it would have been entirely different, and likely more focused on the mystery. It would still have been a good story, but not this absorbing. OTOH, it would likely have been a more straightforward mystery from Detective Elliott Hoyt’s point of view.

I DO think later books in the series will clearly be mysteries, but this one reads more like series setup, character intro, and slice of historical life. I LOVED it, and the audio is terrific, but Harriet’s investigation of her cousin’s death just didn’t feel like it was driving the story in the way it would if this followed the strict rules that make a mystery a mystery. In its own way, learning about who her cousin was and what really happened to her drives Harriet, but it doesn’t drive the story.

So while this did remind me of Nekesa Afia’s Dead, Dead Girls, it also reminded me of Leslye Penelope’s The Monsters We Defy. Those stories are also set in the Harlem Renaissance, both are centered around the black community in Harlem in the 1920s, and both have a mystery element but they also both have a paranormal, fantasy, magical realism element. Harriet’s story does not slip into any magical or fantasy realms, but like both of those readalikes it does seem to be focused more on the history than the mystery.

Your reading mileage may vary on the question of historical fiction vs. historical mystery, but I hope you’ll give this book a try because it was excellent either way. Which means that I’m definitely looking forward to Harriet’s next investigation. I hope it comes soon!

A- #AudioBookReview: All Wrapped Up in You by Rosie Danan

Posted on December 15, 2025December 14, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

All Wrapped Up in You (Home Sweet Holidays) by Rosie Danan
Narrator: Robert Hatchet, Andi Eloise
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #3
Pages: 76
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

Holiday magic helps two oblivious neighbors discover just how close they are in bestselling author Rosie Danan’s cheerful short story about big comedy, small tragedies, and the gifts found in between.
When stand-up comedian Piper has a panic attack outside the club, it’s not funny. But Scott, a handsome ER doctor from the crowd, gives her something to smile about as he calms her down. Turns out they’re neighbors—they just don’t know it yet. When Christmas Eve presents an opportunity for them to get even closer, Scott and Piper realize they share much more than just a wall.
Rosie Danan’s All Wrapped Up in You is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

The thing about these holiday shorts series(es), both this year’s Home Sweet Holidays and last year’s Under the Mistletoe, is that the stories are supposed to be short in length – and they are – so they often take place over a rather short time period to make things work. But speaking of making things work, while ‘love at first sight’ is a fun idea, in real life and a romance where the happy ever after needs to feel earned, somehow a bit of time needs to be shoehorned into that short time period.

Hanukkah romances, like this year’s Merry and Bright, use the eight nights of Hanukkah to their – and the reader’s – advantage. Hanukkah lasts, well, eight nights – and generally parts of the days between those nights. That may or may not be enough time to build a lifetime on, but it can be enough to set the starring couple firmly on that path.

After all, if your new love can fit in and or tolerate – or a bit of both – your family, however wacky or over-the-top or dysfunctional they might be, that’s a good start for a relationship. Also, EIGHT WHOLE NIGHTS.

Howsomever, this story in this year’s Home Sweet Holidays collection isn’t a Hanukkah story – so it needs a different method of making a short time feel longer than it is. A problem which the author solves, and delightfully so, by using a scenario similar to the setup of last year’s Only Santas in the Building.

Stand-up comedian Piper Sadler lives in a Chicago walk-up apartment building. There are only two apartments on each floor, they share a hallway and a window and Piper lives in 3B while her neighbor and secret crush lives in 3A. They’ve never met but they do exchange text messages on a regular basis to complain about the neighbor with the leaf-blower across the street at stupid o’clock in the morning, and to share in the care of 3A’s spider plant in the hallway that 3B is watering and generally keeping alive.

Even when they do meet, they don’t. Piper is outside a comedy club, going through her usual pre-performance case of jittery stage fright – outside, in Chicago, in December, freezing – when Dr. Scott Harrison opens the outside door, hears someone breathing in a pattern that is obviously an incipient panic attack, and goes out to help. Or at least be there if she needs help.

They talk. It’s the most real conversation he’s had in years, with anyone. Not because he’s antisocial or whatever, but because he’s in his third year of residency and working, sleeping, and eating are all about all he has left in him – and he often skips the latter two of those three. He keeps telling himself it will get better but himself isn’t always listening.

She goes onstage, he goes back to the audience, and they still don’t REALLY meet. They don’t meet until she turns up in his ER after a close encounter with a very large amp and a bleeding cut on her forehead.

Even then, they only sorta/kinda meet. They recognize each other from the comedy club – but still don’t know they are neighbors.

By the time they finally do meet, he’s slumped outside her apartment door, having locked himself out of his apartment in an exhausted daze. On Christmas Eve, with no locksmiths available and no friend with a spare couch – or even a spare rectangle of floor – left available that he can beg for the night.

So they haven’t met, but they already know each other. Better than they think they do. Which makes their insta-love not so instant at all. Instead, they’ve earned their holiday season meet-cute AND their hopes for a happy ever after.

Escape Rating A-: First, I loved this for it being Chicago. (I also loved that I lived in a building that sounds very much like the one in the story.) But I could feel the snow crunching underfoot and the freezing fingers of cold fingering their way through every seam of my coat and I felt nostalgic but was really happy not to be in it.

The story does a terrific job of making their brief actual acquaintance seem like a much longer, and surprisingly real, acquaintance. They don’t know each other but they do KNOW each other, and it works. (Only Santas in the Building did too if you like this trope.)

I listened to this one, and Andi Eloise (Piper) and Robert Hatchet (Scott), did a terrific job voicing their characters. The audio versions of these original stories are the perfect length for my daily drive and these stories are a perfect way to spend that drive and get a happy, sweet, pick-me-up story into the bargain.

So I’ve enjoyed this Home Sweet Holidays collection a lot. I also got a bit caught up in the original blurb description for the series (it’s changed) that described them as a “cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances.” I think they changed the blurb because they’re all sweet so far but they’re not cookies. Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright was a donut-like Hanukkah sufganiyot, while this entry in the series is a pumpkin pie. I have no idea which sweet holiday treat the final book in the collection, You Better Not Pout, is going to turn out to be, but we’ll all find out next week, because I’m planning to review that last book on Christmas Eve.

A- #AudioBookReview: Merry and Bright by Ali Rosen

Posted on December 9, 2025December 14, 2025 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews

Merry and Bright (Home Sweet Holidays) by Ali Rosen
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik, Eric Nolan
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #2
Pages: 63
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

What starts as a Hail Mary fake romance scheme turns into the real deal in this delightful story of holiday deception from Ali Rosen, author of Alternate Endings and Recipe for Second Chances.
Miriam Brody is dreading Hanukkah with her overbearing family in Charleston. Ditto for dreamy pro football player Cal Durand and Christmas. After sharing a few flirty drinks on the flight there, the strangers conspire to tackle the holidays together, posing as a couple. But as shenanigans unfold, Miriam realizes her feelings are anything but fake. Uh-oh. Are they headed for a holiday miracle—or a holiday disaster?
Ali Rosen’s Merry and Bright is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

Merry and Bright was every bit as delightful as last week’s Snow Place Like Home, and not just because of the cute title.

I am seeing that one of the treats of this year’s collection is the way that the stories extend the time the featured couple knows each other in order to make the instant romance seem not quite so instant. So far, it’s working for me.

But of course, with Merry and Bright, that’s at least in part because this is a Hanukkah story every bit as much – if not a bit more – than it is a Christmas story. This particular fake romance has eight nights to perform a Hanukkah miracle before it’s all set up to be fulfilled on Christmas.

It also helps that even though Miriam Brody and Cal Durand don’t know each other, they sorta/kinda do. They certainly know all the same people, and even the same neighborhood. They seem to have grown up within walking distance of each other in Charleston even though they must be just far apart enough in age to have not been in the same cohort growing up.

But that childhood proximity leads to some much more interesting adult proximity in the first class section of an airplane on its way to Charleston from New York City. It’s just over a week before Christmas, Hanukkah is about to begin, and neither Miriam nor Cal are looking forward to their family holidays.

Miriam was a VERY unexpected late-in-life child, and her parents, sisters, and in-laws all interrupt her, talk over her, ignore her, and generally treat her as though she’s still TWELVE when she’s nearly 30 and the owner of a VERY successful business. That she is almost the only introvert in a family of extroverts makes being home for the holidays less than fun no matter how much she loves her family. Which she does.

Cal isn’t looking forward to going home to his parents for his holidays because he’s been avoiding it and them for four years for reasons that he just doesn’t want to get into with ANYONE.

They both need buffers from their well-meaning but clueless families, even if those families are clueless for entirely different reasons. They’re both single, and they’ve had a grand time on the plane keeping their various hurts and tender places at bay.

So why not keep going? Why not be each other’s buffer with each other’s family? It’s only to get through the holidays, and then they can go their separate ways back in New York. They can help each other out. It’ll be fun!

Unless all that fake dating turns into real feelings. Dealing with THAT won’t be any fun at all. Unless they can somehow, in spite of their respective holiday baggage, work their way toward an even happier New Year.

Escape Rating A-: Just as in Snow Place Like Home, I got into this because I really, really felt for Miriam and her family dilemma. They do love her, and she does love them. But she’s been the only introvert in a family of extroverts all her life, and it’s only recently that one of her young nephews has joined her in the introvert section of the party.

(Also like Snow Place Like Home, the narrators for this story, Barrie Kreinik as Miriam and Eric Nolan as Cal, did a marvelous job of bringing these characters to life.)

Miriam’s family is loud and boisterous, and she doesn’t fit. That’s uncomfortable but okay. The way they treat her is teeth-grittingly unconscionable, but what works is the way that Cal instantly gets it – and her – the moment he steps into the room. (I did want her to have a big, pardon me considering which holidays we’re talking about, come to Jesus moment with her oblivious family, but, well, baby steps on that score are way more likely to work. Dammit.)

I loved seeing all the Hanukkah details and celebration in a story that is tailor-made for a Hallmark movie. (The delights of feeling seen are very real.) AND the eight nights of Hanukkah provide just enough time for the relationship between Miriam and Cal to get a firm hold on their – and the reader’s – hearts.

Which is when the story runs right into Cal’s family Christmas and the reason he’s been avoiding it. Everyone in that family is on pins and needles, walking on eggshells, living in stasis, all of the above, because Cal’s young wife was killed in a skiing accident four years before and everyone is waiting for Cal to start living again – even though he doesn’t feel like he deserves to.

Just as Cal made her feel seen among her family, she helps him feel heard among his own. Again, he loves them and vice versa, but he and his late wife grew up together and memories of her are EVERYWHERE in that house. Miriam gives him space to breathe and not just start to move on, but accept that it’s okay for him to do so.

If the stories in this Home Sweet Holidays collection represent holiday treats, just as Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright is a Hanukkah sufganiyot, a pillowy donut filled with a sweet jelly center, just as this story is has a lot of holiday light and a big, soft, sweet heart at its own.

I’m having a great time with this collection – and it’s just the perfect length for my daily drive! So I’ll be back next week with the third story, All Wrapped Up in You, and finishing up with You Better Not Pout on Christmas Eve. I’m looking forward to figuring out which holiday cookies match the themes of those stories!

Category: audio reviews

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