EFR REVIEWS

BOOK OF MADNESS & CURES   Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues -- beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes torrid, and often enigmatic letters from his travels as he researches his vast encyclopedia,  The Book of Diseases .  After ten years of missing his kindness, insight, and guidance, Gabriella decides to set off on a quest to find him -- a daunting journey that will take her through great university cities, centers of medicine, and remote villages across Europe. Despite setbacks, wary strangers, and the menaces of the road, the young doctor bravely follows the clues to her lost father, all while tak...

  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...

Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel,  My Life in Middlemarch  takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brin...

Lady friends have been getting on me for ages to read this one and I finally checked it off the list.  The honest truth? Wasn't feeling it.  That's right, I was just sorta "meh" about this one. Some things I liked and related to, other things she talked about left me thinking "REALLY? That's what you're bitching about??" There was a slight air of self-indulgence over everything but, like I've said before, that's not uncommon in a memoir. It's hard to have a fair opinion of all she talks about because we only hear her side. It leaves the reader wondering "Well, what happened though?"  I thought it was kinda messed up for her to be like "Yeah, my marriage failed but I don't really want to get into it." Umm, thought the marriage failing / holy-crap-I'm-thirty freak out was the inspiration for the trip? Maybe SOME details just so we understand better where you're coming from? Not saying she has...

PARIS Much of James' focus on Paris is centered (understandably) around the artists who flocked there for inspiration. The city is famously known for its period of expatriate writers claiming the City Of Love as their own between the 1920s-1950s, but even earlier than that, painters took up residence to capture the light, loves, and overall energy of this beautiful city. the drool-worthy library at Fontainbleau :-) Funny - I've read a number of books about the famous couple who owned this collection  and  I don't remember much about either of them being avid readers....  but I know where I'd be hanging out if I were one of their visitors  back then! The other piece of Paris history that James may have experienced while touring the area - he didn't mention it specifically in the book, but it was a yearly event --  was the time of the Paris Universal Exposition, a World Fair event (similar to the one held in Chicago) that, as far as I can tell, ran...