A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beatriz Williams is one of my favourite authors. I love her historical novels. They are well researched and well written. "A Hundred Summers" spans between 1931 to 1944 and tells the story of Lily Dane and Nick Greenwald. It recounts their love, their loss and the family betrayal they had to endure. In the end, love wins and there is a happy ever after.

View all my reviews

Beartown by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this book from Simon & Schuster via Netgalley in exchange for an honest opinion. Bear Town is a novel about Swedish hockey town which is on the brink of being selected to have a major sports facility constructed in their town. Their chance lays on the local hockey team winning the hockey tournament. On the day of the finals, one of the players is pulled off the team bus by the local police and accused of a major crime against the GM's young daughter. The team lose the finals and the town is on a witch hunt.

I have always been a hockey fan and was raised in a hockey town. My small 5000-people community has seen two of their young hockey players move on to the NHL. This is a rare feat. Beartown is an exciting read and will keep you guessing to the end.

View all my reviews

The Mermaid's Daughter by Ann Claycomb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was intrigued by this book. Who would not like to know what happened to the little mermaid; not the one in the Disney movie, but the one Hans Christian Andersen wrote about? What if she did not kill herself and had a daughter who had a daughter who had a daughter and so forth and so on? What if the spell which cursed the little mermaid would be passed from one generation to the next? So many possibilities to make this sequel a great read. It turned out that the sequel was a good read, but not great. It fell flat when compared to the original book. The Prologue was its redeeming grace. I think I would have like to read the story from that starting point. The Mermaid's Daughter is still a good and interesting read.

View all my reviews

The Little French Bistro by Nina George
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second novel by Nina George I read. I enjoyed the first book a lot and that it always harder on the second. You have expectations and if they are not met, you find yourself wondering how can an author not being able to write as good as a book as the first one you had the pleasure to read. The Little French Bistro started very well but then the story lost its flavour and tasted like leftovers eaten on too many consecutive days. The story could have ended earlier than it did. Instead of concentrating on the main character's indecisions, the author should have exploited the story potential of Marianne's gifts as she discovers them. It is still a good story about starting life at 60.

View all my reviews

The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was very interesting. Although I know who is Albert Einstein as a great theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity; I do not know much about his personal life. This book is about his first wife, Mileva Marić.

Mileva was a Serbian physicist born in 1875. She studied at the Zürich's Polytechnic where she met Albert Einstein. She was the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics. Mileva was brilliant. She and Albert fell in love and had a daughter out of wedlock. They eventually married and had two sons.

There is much debate on Mileva's contribution to Einstein's early work; particularly on the theory of relativity. There is no tangible proof of this except hints that can be found in Mileva and Albert's correspondence to each other.

True or not, this book is a great read and an insight into the life of two great minds and how things don't always go the way you want in life.

View all my reviews