Karen's Reviews

Ronstadt’s gorgeous book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, is an invitation like no other. Her collaboration with Lawrence Downes and Bill Steen merges language, image, food, and family in a sweet reveal of her Mexican-American heritage. This book gently and powerfully showcases Ronstadt’s abiding emotional attachment to past and place.

—KÄREN

With poetic irony, Ackerman tells the little-known true story of two zookeepers in 1930s Warsaw, Poland. Their world-view and extraordinary compassion led them to save hundreds of Jews imperiled by the Nazi invasion. This heroic narrative highlights contradictions of vulnerability and strength, good in the face of loss, and the rich compatibility of beauty and sadness. - Kären

Two characters are the centerpiece in Flemming’s books, yet here it is just Reverend Claire Fergusson. Arriving home after serving as a combat pilot in Iraq, Claire, broken, with PTSD, is without an anchor in spite of being in love and about to marry police chief Russ Van Alstyne.  As a suicide investigation goes sideways, Claire falls more deeply into fear and obsession. Flemming painted this character with real human tones. By the end, I felt she had always been my friend. - Karen

Ritter’s debut novel is a powerful study on how the present can be a recapitulation of the past. The nonprofit lawyer Abby Williams lives a tidy life, her past hidden, until an investigation in her hometown blurs the divisions between geographies and timelines, good and bad, right and wrong. Abby’s story strangely becomes familiar, holding you long past its final pages. - Karen

It is one thing to say that Baume’s character-narrator is a stranger in her depressed life; another that I fell into her life with her. Frankie’s move to her dead grandmother’s cottage does not heal her wounds but instead revitalizes her artistic sensibilities. The photographs Frankie takes of dead animals found on the property provide a strange connection to remembered works of art. These frame her persistence in this unexpectedly uplifting story of reclamation and hope. - Karen