Percival Everett’s James took the country by storm with its release last year. It has already garnered numerous national book awards.
James is the retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but from the servant Jim’s perspective. As you recall, Jim and Huck both have their reasons for fleeing their home, and end up rafting down the Mississippi River–headed for freedom but encountering difficulty, humorous situatons, and adventure along the way.
Without spoiling the story, I’ll just say there’s a startling dialogue change early in the book and an unexpected reveal near the end.
For maximum enjoyment, I recommend you reread Huckleberry Finn . . . and then hunker down and enjoy James.

reviewed May 2025

Full disclosure: Freida McFadden has become one of my favorite secular suspense-thriller authors. She never fails to entertain, and she writes in a straightforward way that makes you feel the characters are talking to you.
With her new suspense thriller, The Crash, she’s done it again. Tegan is a single woman in her eighth month of pregnancy, who makes an ill-advised decision to leave town to visit her brother, Dennis. After surviving a snowy crash, she’s rescued by a couple who live off the grid. Tegan assumes she’s been rescued, but could she be wrong? Could she be imprisoned? And, even worse, with a severe injury? The protagonist, Tegan, and the cast of characters–Dennis, her friend Jackson, her “rescuers,” Polly and Hank, and a little girl, Sadie– evoke visceral responses to their personalities and motives.
McFadden takes the reader down a road […]

Melina Green is a playwright struggling to gain purchase in an industry dominated by men. Similarly, her distant relative from the Elizabethan era, Emilia Bassano, is a struggling writer unable to have her work taken seriously by the men who dominate the theater industry. Two women with similar problems, separated by almost four hundred fifty years.
Jodi Picoult is at her best in this fascinating novel that cleverly intertwines two predicaments separated by so many years. She switches from one timeline to the other, back and forth, as she weaves a tale of how both of these women made ill-advised choices regarding how to get their “foot in the door” of a male-dominated industry.
No spoiler alert, but for any of you who are Shakespeare lovers, some interesting questions are raised about his career […]

Camino Ghosts is the concluding novel in John Grisham’s Camino trilogy: Camino Island, Camino Island, and Camino Ghosts. Mercer Mann, a college professor and rapidly-emerging, successful novelist, returns to Camino Island to marry the man of her dreams and glean inspiration for a new manuscript. Of course, she encounters Bruce Cable, proprietor of Bay Books and former underworld dealer in priceless manuscripts, with whom she has a strong professional relationship and once had a brief romantic fling.

While desperately looking for a story line for her next novel, she encounters Dark Isle, a sliver of land off the coast of Florida, whose last inhabitant is Lovely Jackson–also the sole owner of the island, in her opinion. When Lovely goes up against a huge land developer, Mercer has her story … and her fight.

You’ll enjoy the twists and turns this book takes, […]

Zach Stander, a down-and-out attorney, is called by Eli Jenkins, a free-clinic Black client of his, to represent Eli’s nephew Sam in a murder case. Sam was found covered in blood at the scene of Jessica Gadsden’s murder in a country church on Cicada Road, outside Walterboro, South Carolina. A Black man found at the murder scene of a young white woman in the deep South brings to mind John Grisham’s A Time to Kill and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

To complicate matters, Jessica’s father Buford Gadsden, a powerful and somewhat corrupt local yokel, is seething with anger and thirsting for revenge for his daughter’s murder. This is Stander’s opportunity to either win a case that will restore his reputation or risk losing, sending him farther down the road to destitution or possibly death. He enlists the aid of […]