EFR REVIEWS

  LOVE NOTE Focused on a career in medicine and not on romance, Willa Duvall is thrown slightly off course during the summer of 1865 when she discovers a never-opened love letter in a crack of her old writing desk. Compelled to find the passionate soul who penned it and the person who never received it, she takes a job as a nurse at the seaside estate of Crestwicke Manor.  Everyone at Crestwicke has feelings--mostly negative ones--about the man who wrote the letter, but he seems to have disappeared. With plenty of enticing clues but few answers, Willa's search becomes even more complicated when she misplaces the letter and it passes from person to person in the house, each finding a thrilling or disheartening message in its words.  Laced with mysteries large and small, this romantic Victorian-era tale of love lost, love deferred, and love found is sure to delight. ★ ★ ★ ★1/2 In the summer of 1865, medical student Willa Duvall, of Brighton, England, discovers an unopened l...

  WONDER SHOW Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step inside Mosco’s Traveling Wonder Show, a menagerie of human curiosities and misfits guaranteed to astound and amaze! But perhaps the strangest act of Mosco’s display is Portia Remini, a normal among the freaks, on the run from McGreavy’s Home for Wayward Girls, where Mister watches and waits. He said he would always find Portia, that she could never leave. Free at last, Portia begins a new life on the bally, seeking answers about her father’s disappearance. Will she find him before Mister finds her? It’s a story for the ages, and like everyone who enters the Wonder Show, Portia will never be the same. ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Not even gonna lie, definitely the cover that initially sucked me in... that, and me being a sucker for a story set in a circus community! Growing up in the 1920s-30s, Portia Remini, having been abandoned by her parents, is left in the care of her Aunt Sophia. By Portia's teen years, Sophia decides she's not equippe...

  It's just shy of "Football & Turkey Day", my readers, so let's chat about some football memoirs I've "tackled" recently (I'll just show myself out on that one...) Strength of a Champion : Finding Faith & Fortune Through Adversity by O.J. Brigance, with Peter Schrager. Foreword by Ray Lewis As the Baltimore Ravens made their improbable march to victory in Super Bowl XLVII, they turned to their senior advisor of player development, O.J. Brigance, for inspiration each and every Sunday.  Following a stellar twelve-year career as a linebacker, including a Super Bowl win with Baltimore in 2000, O.J.Juice Brigance joined the Ravens front office. But in 2007, O.J. was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis also known as Lou Gehrig's disease and told he had only three to five years to live. As a player, he'd battled hundreds of injuries and setbacks. None of them prepared him to face ALS.  With faith and determination in his heart and ...

  KEY TO LOVE The only thing Bri Duval loves more than baking petit fours is romance. So much so, she's created her own version of the famous Parisian lovelock wall at her bakery in Story, Kansas. She never expects it to go viral--or for  Trek Magazine  to send travel writer Gerard Fortier to feature the bakery. He's definitely handsome, but Bri has been holding out for a love story like the one her parents had, and that certainly will not include the love-scorned-and-therefore-love-scorning Gerard.  Just when it seems Bri's bakery is poised for unprecedented success, a series of events threaten not just her business but the pedestal she's kept her parents on all these years. Maybe Gerard is right about romance. Or maybe Bri's recipe just needs to be tweaked.  Novelist Betsy St. Amant invites you to experience this sweet story of how love doesn't always look the way we expect--and maybe that's a good thing. ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Baker Bri Duvall has a job she loves, wor...