5 Star Review - Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center

I'm excited to share with you the latest 5 star book I read - "Things You Save in a Fire" by Katherine Center.  It's the best contemporary women's novel I've read in quite a while, hitting that sweet spot I love so much of a book that is written in a relatively light fashion but with deep emotions.

From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2015

Since I started this blog, I've been periodically looking back at my old top 10 favorite book lists, starting with 1999 when I first started compiling a list each year and working my way up towards the present.   If you don't remember the details, these are lists I made contemporaneously at the end of the respective years, made up of books I read in that particular year, not necessarily books published that year.  I started out sharing these lists with just a small group of people, and over the years started sharing with more and more people, and through more and more different means, including this blog!  One of my first posts on the blog was my top 10 books of 2017, so after today's post that means I have just one more to go!  (Unless I keep this blog going for so many more years that enough time goes by that I want to look back on 2017 and after, ha ha.)

Here's my list from 2015, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

The Visitors - Sally Beauman
The One That Got Away - Bethany Chase
The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah
The Last Camellia - Sarah Jio
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
The Lake House - Kate Morton
The Children's Crusade - Ann Packer
The Midnight Rose - Lucinda Riley
Who Do You Love? - Jennifer Weiner
Walking on Trampolines - Frances Whiting

For more random details about these books, keep reading!

Books About Animals

With "The Art of Racing in the Rain" movie adaptation coming out this week, I was thinking about books either told from the perspective of, or primarily about, animals.  Personally, I think these work much better as books than movies, especially if told from the perspective of an animal - a voice-over meant to represent a movie animal can just be cheesy, whereas reading a scene told from an animal's perspective is totally different.  So, color me skeptical of the movie, but here are some books you should check out if this genre is of interest to you.  I'm going to stick with books that are realistic, rather than more fantastical in nature.