Review of This Book Made Me Think of You, by Libby Page

Fiction Review, Romance, Starred Review 0

This Book Made Me Think of You

by Libby Page
read by Zadeiah Campbell-Davies

Books on Tape, 2026. 10 hours, 26 minutes.
Review written June 25, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I loved this book in so many ways.

Six months after her young husband died of cancer, Tillie gets a phone call from a bookshop. The man on the phone tells her he has a package for her – from her husband.

It turns out that Tillie’s husband Joe, before he died, purchased twelve books for Tillie. He wrote a note for each one and left instructions for the bookshop to give her one each month for a full year.

At first, Tillie is resistant. She asks them to give her all the books at once, but Alfie, the bookstore owner, refuses. Tillie has always loved to read, but since Joe got sick, she hasn’t been able to focus.

And then Joe’s first book gets her reading again. And the second book gets her cooking for herself. And later there are books about camping and about running and about going to Paris. And little by little, Tillie starts living life again. As well as evaluating what she wants the rest of her life to look like, now that her original dream has died.

And yes, the book is a romance. Tillie develops a friendship with that bookstore owner. But she is not over Joe yet, and it feels wrong to have feelings for anyone else. And naturally, there are several other complications and misunderstandings. At the same time, the bookshop, which Alfie inherited from his father, is having trouble staying in business.

It’s all wonderfully and beautifully done. As it happened, I started this audiobook on a flight to a vacation in France, where I learned that hearing aids make listening to an audiobook while dining alone a much less obtrusive pleasure than bringing a physical book. I just finished the book on the last day of my trip, and it has been a joy accompanying me. More than just the great story, it felt symbolic. While death is very different from divorce, and while my divorce is long past – on this trip, I revisited the Abbaye de Royaumont – a place where I went on a writers’ retreat with dear friends in 2005, one week after my husband told me he was divorcing me. On the writer’s retreat twenty years ago, I thought about writing, but also planned to get my Master’s in Library Science and become a librarian. It was satisfying and special to go back to the abbey and say to my past self, “That worked out really well.”

So this trip, in many ways, was celebrating how my life has gone after the death of my marriage, and celebrating how much joy is still left in my life, and how I’ve been able to chart my own course. So Tilly’s journey, while different, resonated with me.

Also, there are book recommendations from Alfie at the start of each chapter. I think I need to buy a copy of this book so I can try to read them all.

libbypage.co.uk

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Review of The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy

Adventure, Fiction Review, Historical, Old Favorites, Sonderbooks25, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Scarlet Pimpernel

by Baroness Orczy
read by Geoffrey Howard

Blackstone Publishing, 2006. 8 hours, 20 minutes. Book originally written in 1905.
Review written July 14, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
Original review written October 24, 2001.
2002 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4, Fiction Rereads

As part of #Sonderbooks25, my celebration of my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks, I’m rereading many of my old reviews – at least one from each year’s Sonderbooks Stand-outs. I’ve also found that many of my favorites have an eaudiobook version with my current library – so I’m rediscovering a large number of them as audiobooks. In addition, when those books I’m rereading were reviewed in my first five years of writing Sonderbooks, I’m giving them a new review in the new phone-friendly format.

First, let me say that I love this book. Romance! Adventure! Cleverness! Strategic rescues! Outwitting the bad guys! Clever misdirection! I first read the book in high school and ate it all up. I have lost track of how many times I’ve read the book, but let’s just say that not one word of the audiobook was a surprise. It’s a novel about a band of Englishmen and their daring leader who rescue aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution.

However, writing in 2025, I need to list a few caveats and warnings to other readers. The book was written in 1905. There are several issues.

The biggest one is some frightful antisemitism. A Jewish character is portrayed as despised and contemptible, and pretty much deserving of that. I do have to say that any retelling I’ve ever read and the movies I’ve seen have taken that out. But it’s in the book and is not pretty.

The author was a baroness, so it’s not really a surprise she has deep reverence for the nobility – and some veiled disrespect for the “lower classes.” English working-class are seen as maybe not so bright, but loyal and good-hearted, but French peasants are dirty and despicable for revolting against the nobility.

As for women – well, many things are said about the power of a beautiful woman. But such a woman is frail and delicate, and that power is about her beauty and wit. Yes, our heroine in this book takes action after she unwittingly causes danger to someone she loves – but she can only do so by enlisting the help of men.

At this point, let me note that both retellings that I have enjoyed and reviewed did a gender swap to give a woman the swashbuckling, adventurous role of the Scarlet Pimpernel: Across a Star-Swept Sea, by Diana Peterfreund, and Rook, by Sharon Cameron.

Who is the Scarlet Pimpernel? He’s a master of disguise and a brilliant strategist for rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine. At the start of the book, we don’t know who he is, but we get to see a daring rescue executed before the book ends, with the odious French official utterly fooled.

The writing is full of sentimentality, which I didn’t mind in high school, and have to admit I still don’t mind today. But it also brilliantly begins in the middle of the action, setting up the situation by starting the book with a scene of aristocrats being cleverly smuggled out of Paris. Then we meet the pertinent characters at an inn on the coast in Dover. Even the romance is shown to us in the middle of a misunderstanding that’s six months old. Baroness Orczy knew how to take us right into the middle of the action and shows us back story as it’s pertinent and interesting.

There’s a reason this book has lasted 120 years.

Now, at the time, Baroness Orczy wrote a multitude of sequels. I’ve reviewed several. I found four in a used bookstore one day – and then since their copyright has long passed, I found several more on Amazon print on demand. Most are not as good as the original, but they reliably give swashbuckling adventure and tender romance – and I should read some more before I’m done with #Sonderbooks25.

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Review of This Story Might Save Your Life, by Tiffany Crum

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

This Story Might Save Your Life

by Tiffany Crum
read by Julia Whelan and Sean Patrick Hopkins

Macmillan Audio, 2026. 10 hours, 39 minutes.
Review written July 15, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This audiobook had me riveted from start to finish. I was in the middle of things last night, and when I woke up in the morning, my first thoughts were about this book. I made sure I found times to snatch a listen until it was done.

The book is a tale of two best friends who run a podcast called “This Story Might Save Your Life.” One of Joy or Benny introduces a life-threatening situation, based on a true tale of survival, and the other one ad-libs ideas for what they would do to survive. With banter and lots of humor at the terrible ideas. They finish when the person who researched the story tells how the actual person survived or what experts say you should do to survive in such a case. The podcast is crazy popular because listeners can sense the spark of devoted friendship and respect between Joy and Benny, who met not long after college.

We can tell the book begins on a momentous day, because they call it “Day 1.” The sinister Santa Ana winds are blowing, and they do the start of a podcast together. Joy slips Benny a note to come back and talk with her alone, but we don’t find out why. The next day, Joy and her husband Xander, the producer of the podcast, are missing.

The mystery is this: Where are Joy and Xander? What happened to them? We’re fed information in an exquisitely suspenseful way. Alternate chapters go back in time by giving us excerpts from a memoir Joy was writing with Benny about their friendship. I don’t dare say anything about the crucial developments in the story, because the author so expertly feeds us background and current information at exactly the right pace.

I will say some things we learn right at the start. Joy has narcolepsy, and has had it since high school. She takes a wide variety of medicines to manage it, but she still is known to fall asleep anywhere. This human failing of Joy’s makes her all the more likable from the beginning.

We also learn that the previous year has been tough. Their podcast is wildly popular, and Xander’s trying to arrange a lucrative deal with a production company. But Joy has had a stalker. She hasn’t left her house in six months. There are references to difficult things that happened, but we don’t get the details right away.

And Benny feels terribly guilty about what he said to Joy when they met at her house the night before she disappeared. What did he say? Does it have to do with her disappearance? And where are they now? And why is he hiding Joy’s computer from the police?

I wish I could say more! But when the plotting is just so very good, I don’t want to risk messing it up. I read in Libby that there are some extras on the audio version – the podcast that came at the end of the book is a fun bonus. And there are some nice sound effects thrown in. They include different people’s voices calling in to a Tipline about the missing people. So I’m going to recommend listening to this book if you get the chance.

tiffanycrum.com

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Review of Lady Tremaine, by Rachel Hochhauser

Fairy Tale Variant, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Lady Tremaine

by Rachel Hochhauser
read by Bessie Carter

Macmillan Audio, 2026. 12 hours, 42 minutes.
Review written June 30, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Oh, this one’s brilliant! I’ve made no secret that I love fairy tale retellings. This is something of a feminist retelling of Cinderella – with plenty of depth. I’m going to list it under Historical Fiction rather than Fantasy Fiction, because it takes out the magic in the tale, and looks at the plight of a twice-widowed woman in medieval times trying to protect her daughters.

The book is published for adults, not because of “adult” content, but because the focus is not the young women trying to find husbands, but the mother and stepmother in the tale.

And why did we not notice that Etheldreda Tremaine has a story? Woven through the present of the story, we get Ethel’s back story – how she met and married a man who loved her and they had two daughters, for whom she would do anything.

But when her husband died, his family was going to marry off her daughters and send them away without her, even though they were only 7 and 8 years old. So she found another man to marry, this one with a title.

She tried to be a mother to his motherless daughter, but the girl was resistant. After this husband died, Ethel was left with the estate – but no money to keep it up. His daughter Ellen had a dowry that she couldn’t touch until she got married.

Ethel and her daughters worked hard to put food on the table, but keep up appearances in order to keep the girls’ prospects for marriage open. Ellen? Not so much. She’s used to being a gentleman’s daughter and prefers to stay in her room, reading. As the book opens, Ethel is hunting with the falcon her first husband left behind. Her daughters are diligent – one keeping the books and managing sales of apples, with the other making skilled creations with her embroidery.

At first, I thought it was a simple up-ending of the tale with Cinderella shown to be actually the less hard-working sister. But it goes a lot deeper than that.

When Ellen gets invited to the ball, but her stepsisters don’t, Ethel has to dredge up things from her past to fix matters. But she’ll do anything for her daughters.

And then Ellen misses going to the ball with her stepsisters because she was supposed to make her own dress (with expensive materials provided) – and simply didn’t get it done. It’s not a godmother who helps her show up later, but she does get help.

It’s after Ellen seems to have gained the affections of the Prince that the story turns darker than the fairy tale. Ellen’s going to need her stepmother’s help, and Lady Tremaine is willing to go to the ends of the earth for her stepdaughter.

I can’t give anything away, but the ending is perfect and hugely satisfying – and leaves me with a look at the old fairy tale that I greatly prefer.

rachelhochhauser.com

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Review of Whistler, by Ann Patchett

Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Whistler

by Ann Patchett
read by the Author

Harper, 2026. 10 hours, 45 minutes.
Review written July 1, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Whistler is another rich, warm tapestry of a novel from genius author Ann Patchett.

This one begins when Daphne’s husband notices that a man is following them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The stranger turns out to be Eddie Triplett – her former stepfather. They haven’t seen each other in 44 years, since Daphne was nine years old.

Of the three men her mother married, Eddie was Daphne’s favorite. Her mother had told Daphne that he had to leave because he’d endangered her life in the car accident that happened shortly before she sent him away. Now as an adult, Daphne learns about the real reasons. And she has a lot of unpacking to do.

The story of that car accident from 44 years ago weaves through the book. While her sister was in the hospital with appendicitis and their mother was by her side, Eddie drove Daphne up to a closed-for-the-winter blackberry farm to see the stars – and drove off the side of the hill. Eddie was injured and couldn’t get out, and they spent significant time talking together in the toppled car. Eddie was an editor and told Daphne a story of a book proposal he’d just read where a woman was in an accident and was saved when her horse, Whistler, came back for her.

But the book isn’t simply about that long-ago car accident. It’s also about the present, about reconnecting while making new sense of the past. And above all, it’s about the joy of reuniting with a beloved father figure.

A richly written and evocative book about joy and love. Can I give a stronger recommendation?

annpatchett.com

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Review of Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Legends and Lattes

by Travis Baldree
read by the Author

Macmillan Audio, 2022. 7 hours, 19 minutes.
Review written April 15, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I discovered Travis Baldree from an interview in Writer’s Digest Magazine. When they described his books as “cozy fantasy,” I decided to try them, and I am completely delighted. When I read this one, I wished I had started with it, instead of the prequel, Bookshops and Bonedust – which in the Epilogue gives away a bit of how things turn out, so I wasn’t in as much suspense. But it was a minor thing and didn’t ruin my complete delight with this book.

Legends & Lattes is about an orc woman named Viv who gives up the sword-for-hire life and settles down to start a coffee shop – in a city that’s never heard of coffee.

In her last adventure with the band of mercenaries, her only payment was an artifact that is supposed to bring good fortune. But she’s got a lot of obstacles – an old shop to renovate, some way to drum up business, and people to work with. The people she does find are what make the book especially delightful. There’s a gnome who does construction, a succubus to help run things, and a ratkin who makes amazing pastries to go with the coffee.

But Viv also has to deal with the syndicate running the city and someone who seems to be after her artifact. Will everything fall apart if she loses that token of good fortune?

I enjoyed the way the gnome called coffee “bean juice” and Viv’s explanation that “Latte” was named after the person who invented it. Viv’s got some insecurities trying to be a business owner after years of using force to do things. And definitely has to deal with other people seeing her as a stereotype. Getting to know all the characters in this book was as delightful as eating a chocolate croissant.

travisbaldree.com

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Review of The Favorites, by Layne Fargo

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Contemporary, Fiction Review 0

The Favorites

by Layne Fargo
read by Christine Lakin and a full cast

Books on Tape, 2025. 14 hours, 41 minutes.
Review written March 9, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
2026 Alex Award Winner

The Alex Awards are given to ten books every year for the best books published for adults of interest to teens. I placed holds on the ones that our library had in eaudiobook form, and this was one.

This book is the story of a fictional Olympic ice dancing pair whose story is full of scandal as well as pathos. This book is set up to be a documentary of their real story, produced ten years after their final appearance skating together.

As a mock documentary, this was perfect for audiobook. They did use a full cast, so it feels like the actual people – friends, rivals, and officials who knew the pair – commenting on the big events in their lives.

Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha met when they were children in a small town north of Chicago. When Kat was 9 years old and had just lost her mother, she saw Sheila Lin win gold in the Olympic games as an ice dancer. Kat wanted nothing more than to be just like her. Then Heath Rocha, an orphan in foster care, came along and learned to skate so he could be her partner. They operated on a shoestring budget until they were 16 years old and got the attention of none other than Sheila Lin – and got to train with her one summer in her academy in Los Angeles.

And so their notorious career began. They were recruited to stay on in order to push Sheila’s children to greater heights, the twins Bella and Garret Lin.

This book reads like a gossip magazine. Kat and Heath were obsessed with one another – but not necessarily good for each other. Their relationship, as well as their ice dancing, has many ups and downs as the book goes on.

I’ve never actually been a fan of gossip magazines, and the book felt long (I’m spoiled by reading a lot of children’s books.) – but I still never seriously considered quitting listening. It did have me hooked. Since I started reading it right after the Winter Olympics, it felt timely. (Though I found myself wishing I’d started it before – I would have paid more attention to ice dancing.)

There’s plenty of drama here. Love and obsession. The question of which is more important: people or gold medals? Manipulators out for their own purposes. But by the end, we do see growth and even some wisdom in the characters. I did like reading this after hearing Alysa Liu talking about skating for the love of the art. I think Kat and Heath got there by the end. And the journey is quite a ride.

laynefargo.com

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Review of Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher
read by Jennifer Pickens

Macmillan Audio, 2025. 11 hours, 50 minutes.
Review written April 17, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

So far, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every T. Kingfisher book I’ve read. This one has the added bonus of a self-described “middle-aged” heroine, and that’s always nice for a change. This is cozy fantasy with a dash of creepiness – if mirrors in the dark already spook you, this could make it worse.

Anja is a specialist in poisons and studies them looking for antidotes. She keeps a venomous snake and regularly milks its venom to use to speed up the heart as an antidote for other poisons. Of course she tests it on herself – after roosters, but before trying it on patients.

And then, one day, the king walks into her workshop.

The king believes that his daughter Snow is being poisoned and wants Anja to find a cure. Snow has been unwell since the day the king killed the queen – when she was cutting their other daughter’s heart out.

Anja doesn’t feel skilled in working with people, and especially not 12-year-old girls. But she is good at solving mysteries and figuring out poisons. So she goes with the king to the palace where Snow is staying, along with two bodyguards, in case the poisoner doesn’t want to be found out.

Anja finds Snow eating a strange-looking apple. Naturally, she tests it on herself – and then falls through a mirror into another, reflected world. It stirs her scientific heart, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to figure out why Snow would effectively poison herself. And how does the mirror world work.

I wouldn’t call this a retelling of “Snow White” – but many of the elements are there, and it does have that fairy tale feel. There’s a dash of romance thrown in as well, along with some mystery and danger. I blame this book for me staying up far too late the other night while working on a jigsaw puzzle.

redwombatstudio.com

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Review of What Kind of Paradise, by Janelle Brown

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown
read by Helen Laser and Peter Ganim

Books on Tape, 2025. 11 hours, 42 minutes.
Review written April 27, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2026 Alex Award Winner

Here’s another eaudiobook I only placed on hold because it won an Alex Award. These are given every year to ten books published for adults that are of interest to teens. I almost took this one off my holds list, because the cover didn’t stand out. I couldn’t figure out what the picture was even depicting. (Now I think it’s supposed to have a crack as on an old photo – just of a wilderness, with a lake, forest, and mountains.)

Once I started listening, though – I was mesmerized.

As the book opens, we have an adult woman who’s been tracked down by a reporter after changing her name because her father has been recently in the news. The reporter asks for an exclusive interview, but the woman refuses and tells the listener it would take much more than a magazine article to understand – and then she gives us the book version.

Jane and her father lived on their own land off the grid in Montana starting in 1982 when she was four years old. He tells her that her mother died in a car accident, and he had to get away, but doesn’t tell her much more about her mother. Her father has home schooled her, reading philosophy and learning calculus, and he’s taught her how technology rots the brains of people out there and will bring about the end of civilization. He publishes a zine to spread his views to others, and every few months they go into Bozeman to drop some off at the bookstore there. But readership of his zines is falling off, and in the 90s, the bookstore wants to make room for a tech section.

By this time, Jane is a teen, and getting more and more curious about the outside world. So when her father brings home an old computer and wants Jane to make a website to publish his manifesto against technology, she learns how to do it – but also how to access the internet when her father is gone on one of his mysterious trips.

Jane’s curiosity also extends to her mother. She finds an old photo of her with her mother – but the name of the baby written on the back is not Jane. Was everything her father told her about her past a lie? Her father let slip that they were in Silicon Valley, so she wants to figure out a way to leave, go to Silicon Valley, and find out if her mother is still alive.

I don’t want to give away too much. Even all that I described, which is only the beginning of the book, is full of tension as we watch Jane put together that something’s wrong. When she talks her father into taking her with him on one of his trips so she can escape – well, she does escape, but she’s also an accomplice to a crime.

After that, Jane makes it to Silicon Valley and gets a low-level job with an up-and-coming tech firm. She tries to navigate this new world, find out who she is and if her mother is alive, and at least keep herself from going to jail. Or should she turn her father in?

Another engaging aspect of the book is that tech futurists in the 90s are talking about how we will eventually be able to hold computers in the palm of our hands and how artificial intelligence will be the ruin of us all. You can’t help but think they might be right.

The entire novel had me tense from start to finish, but at the same time, my heart was with Jane trying to navigate adulthood after her extremely unusual childhood. Absolutely brilliant writing, this book is a treat.

janellebrown.com

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Review of Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, by Heather Fawcett

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter

by Heather Fawcett

Del Rey, 2026. 353 pages.
Review written April 14, 2026, from my own copy purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

I love Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde books so much, that when I saw she had a new cozy fantasy novel coming out, I preordered my own copy. Sure, I can read the library’s book, but this is going to be a favorite I’ll want to come back to.

As with Emily Wilde, Agnes Aubert is an ordinary woman – but also very competent and single-minded – who encounters a man who is not quite human.

Agnes is a widow who runs a cat shelter with her sister in 1920s alternate-reality Montreal – but the shop she was renting to run her shelter was recently completely destroyed by two irresponsible magicians having a duel. She looks all over the city for somewhere to move her cats, but everywhere she looks is either too expensive or won’t allow so many cats.

So when a shop in an upscale part of town eagerly signs her up at a reasonable price, she does wonder what’s up. But she’s too desperate for her cats to have a roof over their heads to hesitate for long. But when it turns out that the most notorious magician in the world – the Witch King himself – is running a magic shop in the basement, she’s a bit alarmed.

It turns out the Witch King is socially awkward and allergic to cats. But even he can’t keep a determined cat out of his rooms. And his sister – also a powerful magician – wants a powerful artefact she says he has.

Well, Agnes is not surprised he can’t find it – his rooms are a disorganized mess! That’s something she can fix. And then maybe these magicians will get out of her life.

With all the cats plus many mentions of good food (from the enchanted oven), “cozy fantasy” is the perfect description of this book, solidifying my conviction that it’s my new favorite genre. This one will make you smile. I hope it’s only the beginning of another series.

heatherfawcett.com
heatherfawcett.substack.com
randomhousebooks.com

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