Sunny's bookshelf
Sunny's bookshelf photo by Judy Solomon

Online book reviews since 2011, the very best in reviewing – connecting good readers with equally good writers

Ann Ronald

Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Sisters Brothers

More than four centuries ago, Thomas Nashe published The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) in English and Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote (1605) in Spanish. Together,

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Girl on the Train

A novel of neuroses, The Girl on the Train will drive a sane reader mad. Paula Hawkins has created three psychologically damaged women to tell

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Autobiography/Memoir
Ann Ronald

My Life in Middlemarch

My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead pretends to be writing a riff on her own life as it echoes various Middlemarch themes, but in truth

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British Authors
Ann Ronald

Resorting to Murder

Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries Not long ago I described a new series for “Bookin’ with Sunny” readers. Poisoned Pen Press is offering British Library

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Reviews
Ann Ronald

Dust Bunnies and Dead Bodies

With its pink and lavender cover and its airy insides, Janis Thornton’s Dust Bunnies and Dead Bodies reminds me of cotton candy: sweet, fluffy, probably

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Books on books
Ann Ronald

The Bookman’s Tale

The Bookman’s Tale, A Novel of Obsession Among the many novels speculating about William Shakespeare’s dramatic roots, Charlie Lovett’s The Bookman’s Tale stands as one

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Books on books
Ann Ronald

Let Me Tell You

Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays and Other Writings Two of Shirley Jackson’s children have selected a miscellany of their mother’s writings that have

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Jarrettsville

Jarrettsville fictionalizes a true event that occurred on the fourth anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. The novel opens with the traumatic, climactic scene.

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

A Small Indiscretion

“I resist imagining the present . . . in order to finger my way along the thread, backward to the beginning.” Thus Annie Black Gunnlaugsson

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Art
Ann Ronald

The Painted Girls

Countless late nineteenth-century French novels, paintings and sculptures grew out of a powerful philosophy often called scientific determinism or literary naturalism. Writing of the artistic

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Murder in Piccadilly
Crime
Ann Ronald

Murder in Piccadilly

MURDER IN PICCADILLY Murder in Piccadilly is back! The British Library recently has begun publishing two series for booklovers: Spy Classics and British Library Crime

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Reviews
Ann Ronald

Night Watch

Night Watch presents an intricate literary puzzle, where multiple characters and their lives interlock together, creating an unexpected back-lit photograph of London in the 1940s.

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

Darwin’s Sword

Two-thirds of the way through his science fiction novel, Darwin’s Sword, D. L. Whitehead acknowledges a Frankenstein parallel. Long before that, I had already decided

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Fiction
Ann Ronald

The Children Act

A woman who specializes in family court cases, divorce settlements, and child welfare, finds her own marriage in trouble and her own judgment questionable.This is

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