In Jodi Picoult’s novel, Wish You Were Here, Diana O’Toole, an art associate at Sotheby’s, faces what we all dealt with during the Covid pandemic: chaos, uncertainty about the present and the future, family and work disruption, and the threat of contracting a potentially deadly virus. After planning a romantic getaway to the Galapagos with her fiance, Finn, she elects to go alone after he learns he must stay home to help fight the ensuing battle against the virus. Once there, she experiences the isolation and uncertainty of life we all felt in 2020 and much of 2021, albeit in a much more exotic locale. Her predicament causes her to re-examine her professional life and, when she immerses herself into the affairs of an island teenager who’s harboring family secrets, she begins to question her personal life and the validity […]

Craig Travail, a disenchanted and suddenly unemployed attorney, moves into a retirement community and meets Chuck Yeager Alexander and Harriet Keaton. These quirky characters make for an interesting threesome as they go about helping a young friend re-capture her rightful inheritance. In doing so, they also solve a centuries-old controversy concerning the first independence declaration.

Landis Wade, a Charlotte attorney turned novelist, constructs a fun, fast-paced tale with plot twists and turns, and somehow weaves in a healthy dose of U.S. history along the way. You’ll want to keep reading to find out how these older but not out-dated citizens accomplish their task. Wade sets many of his scenes in landmarks and businesses Charlotte residents will easily recognize and identify with.

An added bonus is the Afterword, in which Wade talks about how he […]

Benji is one of several survivors of a shipwreck who find themselves in a lifeboat. Desperate for someone to save them, a stranger appears out of the water, claiming to be the Lord. They can be saved, he says, if they believe in him. Benji journals the experience in a notebook which is later found in an empty lifeboat washed ashore on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

The diary finds its way to the island’s chief inspector, who is charged with solving its mystery. Albom’s novel weaves a tale of mystery and intrigue, leaving the reader guessing until the final reveal.

Fans of Albom know he is the master at creating stories that involve heavenly issues, and this book is no exception. You will not be disappointed.

(Personal note: I couldn’t wait to read this novel, as […]

Fans of Nicholas Sparks are accustomed to his books’ settings in the Carolinas. The Wish deviates from that template, as it’s set in current day New York City, but goes back in time to when Maggie, the protagonist, was a teen. After getting pregnant, she is shipped off by her Southern California parents to her aunt in Ocracoke, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where she stays until she delivers her baby. While on Ocracoke, Maggie meets another teen, Bryce, and the inevitable Sparks love story begins.

Maggie, now a world-traveled photographer dealing with metastatic cancer, recounts her memory of that time on Ocracoke to Mark, her young assistant. He becomes increasingly devoted to her as her health declines and Christmas approaches, and is determined to prevent her from being alone over the holidays.

Sparks […]

If you love dogs (and who doesn’t?), the author Rick Bragg, or both, you won’t want to miss Bragg’s The Speckled Beauty…a Dog and His People. In my opinion, any book that makes me laugh out loud on one page and has me reading through tears on the next is a book well written.

Speck wanders into Bragg’s yard one day–an uninvited “guest” who just stays. Slowly, he then wanders into Rick’s soul as well. He is, as Bragg says, a “terrible dog,” bent on destroying or eating everything he encounters. But Speck lives under the delusion that he’s a good boy because of, as Bragg says, “the thousands of times I have lied and told him so.”

In his down home-flavored method of writing, Bragg hilariously recounts his family’s life with Speck, and how […]