Malasz

Lorraine Anderson was meant to be making a Sunday roast, not swanning off to Thailand, backpack in hand! But when she finds her husband and her best friend in bed together there’s only one thing to do – grab her passport and never look back! Now, with each mile travelled Lori sheds the woman she once was and finds the woman she was always meant to be. A woman of passion and spirit who deserves to explore the great unknown…and to indulge in the temptation she encounters along the way! I have enjoyed previous novels by Janice Horton before and having seen pictures of the locations the author is travelling around I was looking forward to reading her new novel The Backpacking Housewife. The book opens when Lorraine has discovered her Husband is having an affair with her bestfriend. Lorraine decides the best way for her to cope is to get as far away from everything as she can so she embarks on a backpacking adventure around Thailand. The author has clearly visited some breath-taking places ...

Fiction Crime that’s out of this world BLOOD ORBIT A Gattis File Novel By K.R. Richardson 495 pp. Pyr Reviewed by Eric Petersen Author K.R. Richardson (actually Kat Richardson writing under a not-so-secret pseudonym) offers the first in what promises to be an intriguing series that blends police procedural, crime noir, and thought-provoking science fiction. In the distant future, the exotic, corporate owned planet Gattis serves as a tourist haven where vice drives the economy. The corporation that owns Gattis promised the two native, human-like races that live on the planet, the Dreihleen (who have yellow skin) and the Ohba (who have blue skin), prosperity and the good life that comes with it. Instead, both races have felt oppressed and disenfranchised for generations. Unfortunately, they hate each other more than the corporation, and the corporate leaders are experts at stoking racial tensions and using them to keep both races down. The Dreihleen have it the worst; while t...

Nonfiction Abolition on Earth, canals on Mars THE LOWELLS OF MASSACHUSETTS: An American Family By Nina Sankovitch 382 pp. St. Martin’s Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. Over fifteen generations the Lowell clan, originally the Lowle family of Bristol, England managed to be a successful and productive family in New England life. Through this well-written book the author shows the family morphing from prominence in religion to manufacturing to public service to astronomy and then into literature. Though there are setbacks, sometimes major ones, the family seems to survive through it all as if it were a living entity. The family left England because though prosperous, the taxes and duties were rising, harvests had failed and then, in 1639, the King called for able-bodied men to join a fight against Scotland. The family settled in the small community of Newbury north of Boston. Church was important, and the Congregationalist Puritans did not want to create a new church like the Pilgrims. ...

Nonfiction A warrior’s closeted heart FBI GIRL: HOW I LEARNED TO CRACK MY FATHER’S CODE . . . WITH LOVE By Maura Conlon-McIvor 306 pp. Resource Publications Reviewed by Diane Diekman FBI Girl: How I Learned To Crack My Father’s Code . . . With Love is the coming-of-age memoir of Maura Conlon-McIvor. Originally published in 2004, it is being reissued in softcover and as an audiobook. The story was adapted for the stage at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The press release promised a Nancy-Drew-type murder mystery in real life, with a little-brother sidekick and an FBI father. This reviewer’s expectations were high. Joe Conlon is a career FBI agent who moved his family from New York City to Los Angeles, where he and his wife raise their five children in the late 1960s. Seemingly unable to show feelings of love, he interacts with his children mainly through his passion for baseball. The memoir is written in present tense, through the voice of fourth-grader Maura, the second eldest c...

Nonfiction The sun looked like the moon PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Caroline Fraser 515 pp. Metropolitan Books Reviewed by Diane Diekman Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder recently won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. And deservedly so. Caroline Fraser did a masterful job of researching and describing both the life and the times of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser writes in the introduction that Wilder’s life was “a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it.” That is exactly what Prairie Fires does. Wilder became world famous through her Little House books, written in the 1930s about her childhood as a pioneer girl and a teacher in one-room schools on the South Dakota prairie. With the editorial assistance of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, she produced an eight-volume series of children’s fiction based on fact. Wilder died at age ninety, in 1957, at the time I was beginning t...