⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 stars) What do you get when you throw together an eighty-four-year-old spitfire with a suitcase full of secrets and a twenty-one-year-old gamer girl who’d rather hide under the covers than face real life? In Colleen Oakley’s The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, you get a hilarious, heart-squeezing road trip that proves friendship has no age limit. Louise hires Tanner as her reluctant caretaker, but before either of them knows it, they’re on the run—destination unclear, motives questionable, and plenty of “wait, WHAT just happened?” moments along the way. The dialogue is whip-smart, the characters are quirky and lovable, and Oakley sneaks in just enough mystery to […]
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Cash Blackbear Rides Again in Broken Fields
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (4.5 stars) Cash Blackbear never goes looking for trouble, but trouble always finds her. When the Ojibwe college student and farmhand stumbles across a murdered farmer and a frightened young girl in rural Minnesota, she’s pulled into a case as tangled as the furrows she plows. What unfolds is more than a mystery—it’s a stark look at the foster care system, the weight of racism, and what it means to fight for survival when the odds are stacked against you. Marcie R. Rendon’s Broken Fields is one of those mysteries you inhale in a weekend. On the surface, it’s a deliciously complicated whodunit set in 1970s Minnesota farm country. […]
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Secrets, Sisterhood, and Spies on Martha’s Vineyard
Martha Hall Kelley, one of my favorite historical fiction novelists, delivers another captivating tale in The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club. The title is a bit misleading—it isn’t really about a book club—but what unfolds is far richer and more intriguing. The dual timeline begins in 2016, when Mari Starwood travels from California to Martha’s Vineyard with nothing but a name on a scrap of paper. There she meets Elizabeth Devereaux, a reclusive painter whose family story reshapes Mari’s understanding of her own past. The heart of the novel, though, lies in 1942. Sisters Cadence and Briar Smith struggle to hold their farm together while U.S. troops train on […]
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