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Strong (Historical) Women's Fiction Ends As A Breathtaking Thriller. First, I got this Advance Review Copy in a somewhat unusual manner - via winning Bryce's contest in the annual Great Big Giveaway Day 2025 hosted by the Facebook group Readers Coffeehouse, which I've been a member of for quite some time and actively assist the Founders (Steena Holmes, Laura Drake, Cathy Lamb, Barbara Claypole White, Kimberly Belle, and Catherine Ryan Hyde) with every year via tracking all the books and winners in all the contests along with my partner in that effort, Ann Marie McKeon Gruszkowski. This is something that I have a lot of fun with every year and find a lot of new books at every year, and I encourage all readers and authors to give it a look. On the version of this review on my blog, BookAnon.com, and my SubStack, I'll link the document of all the participating authors and books from the 2025 contest here. So I've actually had ...

Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Werner Heisenberg. In this text, Joseloff almost portrays the leading nuclear scientists of the WWII era - particularly Oppenheimer and Fermi vs Heisenberg - as a Professor X vs Magneto friendship yet rivals, still with humanity's freedom - and possibly existence - at stake. Written in an approachable more journalistic rather than academic style befitting Joseloff's background as an Emmy award winning news producer for various cable networks, thriller/ action fans may actually be able to enjoy this particular nonfiction book quite well.

This noted, the cast of "characters" is rather large - if you have trouble keeping track of half a dozen different characters in a tal...

For this blog tour, we're looking at a worthy successor and conclusion of this romance duology. For this blog tour, we're looking at All The Ways You Break Me by Melissa Weisner.

First, the review I posted to the book sites (BookHype.com / Goodreads.com / TheStoryGraph.com), YouTube, and Substack:

Worthy Successor. This is one of those duologies where the first book is *so* strong, how can a second *possibly* hold up to it? And yet the second one comes and shows that it is every bit the first tale's equal.

Pretty well everything that was present in the first book is back in some form. The teen romance. The second chance a decade or so later. The mystery. The tragedy. About the only thing *not* here from the first book is the one thing the most people likely had the most problems with, except that in its place we get something that arguably even more people will have a problem with... though in this case (fortunately) it isn't anywhere near as explicit.

As to what this thing is, I applaud Wiesner for having a webpage listing trigger warnings for this book rather than listing them at the front of the book and thereby making them unavoidable for those reading on eR...

Non-Sigma Adventure Blend of Rollins, Reilly, Robinson, And Others. Up front, for long time fans of Rollins: This is *NOT* a Sigma Force book... but it *is* written in such a way that I could see this book being retconned into that series at a later point via having these characters show up in a future Sigma book. The style of this tale and the Sigma books are very similar, so it really wouldn't shock me at all there.

For others who have never read one of Rollins' earlier thrillers - mostly in the aforementioned Sigma Fo...

Interesting History That Can In Fact Comes Across As Extended Ad For Author's Day Job. I was perusing the existing reviews on Goodreads as I sat down to write this review, as is my custom, when I saw a 2 star review mention that this book felt, to that reviewer, at least partially like an extended ad for the author's day job as a science reporter for The Economist and actually agreed with that point in retrospect.

Written almost as much in a memoir style as even a popular science history type book - the author's bread and butter for twenty years now both in articles for The Economist and in books on various topics over the years, if you didn't know (see what I did there? ;) )- this is actually the second book this month I read that dealt with a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweiss and his pioneering antiseptic work in the 19th century, with the other being ...

Food - Like Reading - Is Not Political, Despite Authors' Claims. I came into this book expecting a more science/ tech look at why industrial food is good (it is, and the authors are correct on this) and how it can be made better... and instead got a book focused almost entirely on the politics of the food industry and why the authors think that the small food/ farm to table crowd ala Michael Pollan and others is wrong. While I tend to agree with the authors in outcome, their reasoning here was extremely elitist and pro-totalitarian-government-intervention, with nearly every recommendation they make ultimately coming down to "government should dictate either specific actions or at worst the range of choices that businesses and consumers will have available to them".

Given that one of the authors works in NYC and the other in Europe, perhaps this is understandable cultural bias, and perhaps you, the reader of my review, will agree with their reasonings as well as their outcomes. But for myself, a former Libertarian Party official wh...

What If Carrie Never Developed Superpowers? Seriously, that's the kind of vibe I got from this book, particularly with the way Carrie is set up with such an abusive and controlling parent and is mocked so heavily at school, both of which are features here.

No, this isn't "Will Dean" the way I've read him these more recent books (Last Passenger, The Chamber), wherein there was some truly isolated setting and some huge twist... and you know what, it actually works in his favor in this case, because he is still able to craft an isolated type of story in an atypica...

Proof That The Greatest Romances Don't Always Involve HEA. Oh that title is sure to roil up oh so many in booklandia, but this tale really is, at least in some ways, proof of something I've personally long held, that the greatest *romance* stories known to humanity don't always involve a happily ever after.

Like Tom Clancy's Without Remorse, we get an all too brief but oh so epic romance tale for the absolute *ages*... before we see it shattered in an instant. The love - and the tragedy - are far *too* real in MacLean's words, and the room will get quite dusty indeed through this section of our tale.

And then, like Without Remorse again, we get a new romance at some time period after the initial one, and this is where we spend the majority of the tale (unlike Without Rem...

Solid Mary Kubica Thriller. That's really all long time fans of Kubica need to know - she's written yet another thriller that will have you breathlessly up way too late in the evening because "just one more chapter" keeps being repeated. One where the twists are coming almost literally until the very last word of the text.

For those new to Kubica, while I can't honestly say I've read *everything* she's written, I've read seve...

Ironic Downfall. Seriously, how much more ironic can you get than a book about citizenship being felled by... *a lack of documentation*????

To be clear, there are *many* more issues with this book. The biggest being that it is marketed as a critical and intellectual examination of the concept of citizenship (which is intriguing and deserves to be written about)... and instead what we actually get is a racist memoir that openly proclaims that the entire concept of citizenship was created whole cloth in the US in the 19th century to keep the brown person down and give the evil white man ...