"November Fox" is definitely not your typical novel. Not only does the author provide music to listen to while reading the novel (on her linked webpage), she also promises that the book's illustrations are multilayered and they will be unlocked by an App the reader can download to a digital device. Whimsey, sorrow, heartbreak, trauma, joy, love, adventure, beauty, and magical pages in a ruby red bottle washed up on the English seaside. All of these, and this is only the first book of the "November Fox" experience. What an amazing roller coaster of a book!
You can purchase November Fox here.
(In return for an honest review, I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.)
Series: November Fox
Paperback: 292 pages
Publisher: Conscious Fiction; 2 edition (October 28, 2016)
(Photos and trailer courtesy of E.E. Bertram.)
Anne Perry's "A Christmas Message" reaffirmed why I love her books. Her ability to weave romance, mystery, history and the spiritual in an intelligent absorbing narrative is unsurpassed. She is unafraid to depict historical events that other authors avoid, and her characters age. Since I also age, it is refreshing to find protagonists on the far side of 40.
Major Pettigrew is a 68 year-old widower. His beloved wife Nancy has been gone for six years. His father was a British military officer stationed in Lahore, India in the last days before the partition of India and Pakistan in the 1940s. On his deathbed, his father's last wish was for each son to have one of a pair of valuable Churchill guns, and pledge to reunite the pair for future generations of Pettigrews. For many years, the Major has been bitter about the splitting of the pair of guns, but his brother has refused to sell it to him, and now his brother has died suddenly. The day he learns of the death, Mrs. Ali, a widowed Pakistani shop owner in his little village of Edgecombe St. Mary, has come to collect payment for his newspaper. She finds him about to collapse, and makes him tea. Thus is their friendship born.
Barbara Amaya was, literally, nobody's girl. Raised in the 1960s in Fairfax, Virginia by a father who worked at the Pentagon, and a stay-at-home, alcoholic mother, Amaya ran away to D.C. at 12 to escape her father's sexual abuse. After finding "refuge" with a hippy couple, she was soon selling her body on the streets of D.C. At 13, she was "sold" to a New York City pimp named Moses.
It is 1954 in Rochester, New York, a city known for its cold winters, where summer sometimes comes early "and sometimes not at all." Libby Archer's father has just died and left her with a large Victorian-style house, no college education and a fierce desire to see the world and experience life. Pressured by her neighbors and friends to marry as soon as possible, the complex Libby yearns for more. In what she hopes is an escape to independence she flies to family in Ireland aboard an early transatlantic airplane.
Imagine a world where everyone is telepathic and able to read the thoughts of everyone else. In "Crosstalk, "Connie Willis demonstrates that this is not just a bad idea, it is insanity. Doing what she does better than any other modern author, Willis takes us deep into a potentially feasible technology and then moves that technology just one step further. The result is an absorbing, and fascinating story, with a large dose of humor.
"Echo," the sixth Kate Redman novel, catapults author Celina Grace into the same realm as Margaret Maron, and Deborah Crombie. In Echo, the slight bumps and snags of Grace's earlier portrayals of Redman are gone. Redman's voice is now clearly heard. She is a tough police officer with a strong moral compass, a struggling, conflicted daughter, and a single woman trying to combine career and relationships.
Marc Shapiro sets out in this biography of Donald Trump not to just regurgitate the well known, but, instead, to present "the moments in his life, good and bad, large and small, that combined to make Donald Trump something special in a whole lot of different worlds and, currently have made him a legitimate candidate for one of the biggest jobs on the planet…President of the United States." Even so, there is not much in this biography that has not already been written about in prior Trump biographies or autobiographies. We know, for example, about Spy Magazine's 1988 article on Trump where it described Trump “as a short fingered vulgarian. A bombastic, self-aggrandizing un-self-aware bully with a curious relationship with the truth.” We also know about Trump's multiple marriages and affairs, his business successes and failures, as well as his numerous threats of lawsuits and his famous line: "If you hit me, I will hit you back 100 times harder.” 
Lindsay Jayne Ashford, takes us back to 1928, when thirty-eight year old Agatha Christie traveled under a pseudonym to Mesopotamia aboard the Orient Express. For the first time in her life, Christie "was traveling abroad on her own. Everything she would do in the next two months would be entirely of her own choosing. She would find out if she could do it. If she could stand being alone," and if she could finally banish the ghost of her ex-husband who had betrayed her in every possible way.
Writing a book of quotes takes courage because the line between inspired and hackneyed is very thin. For the most part, Cheryl Strayed's "Brave Enough" manages not to cross that line. Her quotes are intended to comfort the bereaved and broken-hearted, keep the ambitious focused, and help the lost find their way home. But why write a book about quotes? According to Strayed, quotes "tell us we’re not alone. Their existence is proof that others have questioned, grappled with, and come to know the same truths we question and grapple with, too." They are powerful because "Quotes, at their core, almost always shout 'Yes!'"
"Victoria Crossing" is a well researched, beautifully written, work of historical fiction that transports us to New York City in the decade before the Civil War. Teeming with immigrants crammed into decaying tenements, New York at that time was a place where penniless hard workers could become prosperous. 
You are five years old and your parents and sister love you and spoil you. You love going to school and playing with your friends. Your mother cooks your favorite foods and your father creates toys for you and your friends.
Eunsun Kim is not even thirty years old, but:
I have read many books written by North Korean refugees or journalists visiting North Korea under cover or journalists captured and held by North Korea. Each book had something unique to offer, and each was an important book. "My Holiday in North Korea," however, may be the most unique of the unique because Wendy Simmons brings such a love of people and joyousness to this story about her short visit to North Korea. Throughout the book, we are treated to the best and worst of North Korea: the empty, "new," Women's Maternity Hospital filled with antiquated technology; the barely edible food that was luxurious under the standard of living that most North Koreans endure; the wedding where the bride did not welcome a western tourist; the lack of stores and traffic in Pyongyang; the multiple, "spontaneous" encounters with students in classrooms, factory workers and others- all staged and pre-choreographed; and the two minders and driver who were with Ms. Simmons every waking minute.
Yeonmi Park is a human rights activist who escaped, at the age of 13, from North Korea to China in order to survive. A victim of the Kim Dynasty's famine, Park was trafficked in China, along with her mother. Her memoir, "In Order to Live," pulls no punches. She was born at a time when the North Korean government was losing its subsidies from Russia as communism collapsed. While her family lived well for a time due to her parents black market trading, eventually that ended when her father was thrown in a labor camp. His health was completely broken there, and he was unable to care for his family when he managed to get out early.
Every "Dead-End Job" mystery by Elaine Viets is fabulous. In each novel, protagonist, former corporate executive, Helen Hawthorn, works at a different job. The jobs, in a hair salon, bridal shop, dog grooming business and other businesses, are described as dead-end only because Helen becomes involved in murder investigations in each job. What Viets gets right every time is the warmth and honesty many of Helen's co-workers (except for the killers) bring to the job and to their friendships with Helen. In "Board Stiff," Viets brings to life the waitress who has graduated from the school of hard knocks, and the board-rental business owner who is under attack. Viets also brings back at least one tough and likeable character from prior books.
This book was personal for Elaine Viets. That became clear shortly after I started reading it. Having read most of her other books, the grittiness, the despair, and the pain of the protagonist in "Brain Storm" seemed out of place in a Viets novel. Yet, these elements also make it one of her best books to-date.
In "The Forgotten Flapper," Laini Giles manages to infuse a tragic, somewhat fictionalized, biography with the magic of the Ziegfield Follies, the excitement of early Hollywood, and the whimsey of the "Topper" movies. Olive Thomas, the subject of the book, was the first "Baby Vamp," and the term "Flapper" came from her 1920 film, "The Flapper." After dying in 1920 from an accidental poisoning, Olive, apparently, has haunted the New Amsterdam Theater on Times Square. (According to the current director of the theater, Disney contractors encountered Olive often while refurbishing the theater in the 1990s.) The story of Olive's journey from a poor, Pennsylvania family to star of the Ziegfield Follies and then to silent movie star, is both painful and endearing. Olive was a talented actress who, at the age of 21, was already trying to get experience in directing and writing movies. Giles has managed to present Olive's life without the usual, annoying cliches found in a rags to poor, little rich girl story. She also has managed to strip away the fictional gloss of the Pickford family, including Jack Pickford, Olive's husband, and Mary Pickford, Olive's sister-in-law. It's hard to imagine a crueler, colder set of in-laws than Mary and her mother Charlotte as depicted in the "The Forgotten Flapper."
Did you ever want to time travel back to Hollywood in the 1930s? Do you inhale the films of Hollywood's Golden Age? Do you ever wonder what Hollywood was truly like at that time? If you can answer "yes" to at least one of these questions, then you must read Martin Turnbull's "The Garden On Sunset: A Novel of Golden-Era Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah Novels, Book One)."
In his second "Garden of Allah" novel, "The Trouble with Scarlett," Martin Turnbull takes us back to the late 1930s where our three friends, Kathryn, Marcus, and Gwendolyn are a little older, much wiser, and still living at Hollywood's Garden of Allah Hotel.
The fens or fenlands, with its low-lying villages and farms, is an ancient, tradition-steeped part of eastern England. When Amber burns out at her stressful PR job in London, she moves her life to Skylark Farm, an apple farm in the fenlands managed by her boyfriend, Jake, and his 70-something Aunt Annie. As Amber settles in with her new life and friends, we also meet the farm's other inhabitants, including Pip, the pudgy pony, and Patricia, a very broody old hen, who patiently sits on eggs waiting for little chicks to hatch, despite the fact that this is impossible since there is no rooster at the farm.
