Rants and reflections on baby boomer lifestyle, fashion, current events, and more . . . .
Canadian authors, particularly female authors, have a unique voice that is always such a pleasure to read, even when the subject matter is not exactly uplifting. Miriam Toews deserves to be heralded right up there with the Margaret Atwoods of our country because her work is guaranteed to touch the hearts and minds of Canadian women. It isn’t just the geographical references or the idiom…
Author Tina Brown has exceptionally strong credentials so the information about the royal family contained in her new book The Palace Papers: Inside The House of Windsor, The Truth and The Turmoil must be true. Right? As a former magazine editor as well as a friend and confidante of dozens, even hundreds of famous people, Brown is well-qualified to dish the dirt on the Royal…
Miriam Margolyes is a self-described short, fat, Jewish lesbian. She is also one of Britain’s most beloved actors and she’s eighty years old. Oh, the stories she tells in her new memoir This Much is True. I have seen her interviewed a few times on The Graham Norton Show and when she mentioned she had written a memoir I knew I had to read it. Margolyes…
When I heard that one of my favourite Canadian authors, Heather O’Neill was releasing a new book in April, my name was among the first on the waitlist at the library. Like her other books, When We Lost Our Heads is set in Montreal; this time it’s in the 1870s but her characters are just as fascinating as in her earlier books. The two main protagonists,…
When my friend Margaret recommended The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher it went right to the top of my To Read list. Anything with Paris in the title usually gets my attention but this book, in particular, pulls together the threads of so many books of historical fiction I’ve read over the years. Maher’s story about real-life Paris bookstore owner Sylvia Beach is a pleasure to read…
Oh, William! is the fourth novel I’ve read now by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout and she does not disappoint. This book is slightly more complicated than the others in that it’s a psychological study of Lucy Barton (the main character from her earlier book, My Name is Lucy Barton, and her relationship with her first husband. William Gerhardt was her first husband and father…