Number of pages: 464

Number of times read (including the time before this review): 1

Rating (out of five stars): 5

Release Date: January 15^th, 2019

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy in exchange for a review. My opinions are honest and my own.

It didn’t manage to make me cry, but it did manage to slowly break my heart, so that’s something. I’m not really sure if I’m okay, and I probably shouldn’t be writing this right after finishing it, but I’m doing it anyway because I make good choices.

Speaking of not making good choices, prepare to meet the main cast who are all just trying their best. And their best barely keeps them alive throughout most of this. Still, I love them all so much. I just want to give them all a hug and protect them forever. If…

The Mermaid

By: Christina Henry

Grade: B+

It seems like there are a ton of mermaid/sea creature books out this year and I’m going to read my fair share of them. Though to be honest what drew me to this one was the P.T. Barnum angle as much as the mermaid.

Before Mars

By: Emma Newman

Grade: C+

*Netgalley kindly provided me with a copy but that has not impacted my review.

What if they are out to get you? What if they are out to get you even on Mars? I rarely request books from Netgalley but this one just seemed so up my reading alley right now that I had to give it a go. Our main character Anna is a geologist and artist whose sent to the base on Mars in order to paint pretty pictures for her boss to sell. We are thrown into it pretty much from the minute she arrives from her solo flight.

An Anonymous Girl

By: Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

Grade: B

Releases: January 8th

It probably is and you should run away.

When Jessica lies her way into a morality study the strapped for cash girl feels like she hit the jackpot when the Doctor chooses her for “further studies.” Unfortunately for Jess Doctor Lydia has her own goals for this one and may severely be in need of a therapist herself.

Soon Jess finds herself trapped in a maze not only with no way out but no clear definition of the rules.

The arrival of Smoky the Brave has prompted a departure in guest reviewing on this site.  Since the book is about the heroism of a Yorkshire Terrier during WW2, it seemed appropriate to invite Amber the Silky Terrier, a most perceptive pooch of my acquaintance and a close cousin to the Yorkie, to comment on the merits of the book… since she comes from the same family of tiny but courageous and indefatigable dogs, who could be better to review this heroic tale?

A brief introduction is in order:

Amber is a three-year-old Australian Silky Terrier who has adopted a human family of bookish tastes. (You can see her in this photo, guarding the household collection of recipe books).  She weighs just on four kilos, and like all Silkies is brave and ferocious, fleeing in panic only at the unmistakeable signs of a forthcoming bath.

(She doesn’t like to be…

I don’t like reading military combat histories and though this blog has a category called ‘War, Armed Conflict and its Aftermath‘ many of the reviews are of novels, and most of the other non-fiction books in this category are about aspects of war other than combat.

So I might not have read The Dead Still Cry Out, the Story of a Combat Cameraman which won the 2018 Mark and Yvette Moran NIB (Waverly Library) NIB Award it if I hadn’t heard the author interviewed by Sarah Kanowski on ABC Radio, in Conversations (Jun 18, 2018).  I realised then that Helen Lewis’s account of her father’s war was significantly more than military history.  And now that I’ve read it, I’ll repeat what I said in my review of Tobruk 1941: sometimes history is worth reading because of the subject matter and sometimes it’s worth reading because of the…

This cormorant seems to have caught,

more than he can swallow!

His mother obviously never taught him, not to gulp his food.

The Snowy Egrets,

also seem to bite off more than they can chew,

but there is lots of determination,

to eat what you catch,

no matter how hard it is,

to swallow!

Cheers to you from the very well fed Cormorants & Egrets~

Spending the holidays with family in Santa Cruz California,

and spied this young egret on Christmas Day.

He had romance on his mind,

but his timing was all wrong.

He expected affection,

prior to,

fine dining!

Live and learn.

He got the dinner,

but not the date!

Cheers to you from sunny Santa Cruz~

It’s not possible to read a book like this without being a little awestruck at what ordinary people endured in Britain during WW2.   This remarkable history of the unsung women of Bletchley is an eye-opener into working conditions that none of us would tolerate today…

Bletchley Park, immortalised in films such as The Imitation Game and the TV series The Bletchley Circle, was the centre of intelligence gathering in Britain.  As the war progressed, Bletchley grew from modest beginnings in 1938 to employing thousands of people engaged in the complex work of decoding enemy transmissions, and was the birthplace of modern computing.  Today the site is a heritage tourist attraction but during the war it was top secret and the people who worked there were all bound by the Official Secrets Act.

For the young women recruited into the service—from the ATS, the WRENS, the WAAF and civilian life—their work was…