A Discovery of Witches

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

A Discovery of Witches (All Souls Trilogy #1)

Deborah Harkness

Viking Penguin: 2011, 579 pages

Audiobook length: 24 hours and 2 minutes

Read by Jennifer Ikeda

Reviewed by Jessie Park

Diana Bishop comes from a long line of witches (think back to Salem, Massachusetts) but refuses to give into her magical heritage.  She focuses instead on her work as a historian, spending the year in Oxford for her latest research.  When she unknowingly comes across a magical manuscript thought long lost for centuries, the creature world becomes abuzz with excitement.  Soon there are witches, vampires, and daemons coming into the Bodleian Library in droves, including one Matthew Clairmont, a very old and very intense vampire.  They all believe Diana holds the key in unlocking the bewitched manuscript but Diana doesn't want to be a part of it, at all.  Soon events bind Diana and Matthew to work together while facing increasingly dangerous enemies.  Audiobook narrator Jennifer Ikeda does an excellent job creating a soothing voice in Diana while also managing a wide variety of accents.

The Nightingale

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah

St. Martin's Press: 2015, 440 pages

Reviewed by Tori Lyons

Vianne and Isabelle's relationship has not been an easy one since their mother died when they were young girls and their father virtually abandoned them.  When the Nazis invade France, Vianne's husband heads to fight the German forces while she tries to protect their daughter.  The younger, rebellious Isabelle, on the other hand, views Vianne's behavior as complacency and leaves her sister's home to join the Resistance.  Throughout the next few years, each sister faces hardships and horrors that would have been inconceivable before the war.  The Nightingale is a heartbreaking story of the women of war-torn France. 

The Nightingale

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah

St. Martin's Press: 2015, 440 pages

Reviewed by Sheryl Walters

In The Nightingale, two sisters learn to survive in war-torn France in the 1930's.  Each takes a different path and struggles to stay alive, while at the same time helping others, as the Germans take over every aspect of their lives.  This story is heart wrenching and contains heroism that makes it worth the read.

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

Leslye Walton

Candlewick Press: 2014, 301 pages

Reviewed by Jessie Park

Ava Lavender was born with actual wings like a bird.  Unsure of why, she decides to research into her family and see, perhaps, where she got this unusual 'trait' from.  Half of the book goes into Ava's family on her mother's side and how they are all unlucky in love and the other half is spent on how teenage Ava ventures out into the real world, with some wonderful but also terrible results.  The book is considered magical realism and Walton does a great job making the hints of magic real enough to make sense, even if it could never occur in real life.  I would recommend this book to older teens as it does have some strong language, not consistently but sprinkled throughout, and there are scenes of descriptive violence.  There is also a part in the book that can be a trigger warning for those who have experienced sexual assault.

A Star for Mrs. Blake

Cover retrieved from Goodreads

A Star for Mrs. Blake

April Smith

Knopf: 2014, 352 pages

Read by Michelle Croy

A Star for Mrs. Blake is a novel set in the 1930's about five American women - Gold Star Mothers - who travel to France to visit the graves of their sons who fought in World War I: a pilgrimage that will change their lives in unforeseeable and indelible ways.  The women meet for the first time just before their journey begins: Katie, an Irish maid from Dorchester, Massachusetts; Minnie, wife of an immigrant Russian Jewish chicken farmer; Bobbie, a wealthy Boston socialite; Wilhelmina, a former tennis star in precarious mental health; and Cora Blake, a single mother and librarian from coastal Maine.  In Paris, Cora meets a journalist whose drug habit helps him hide from his own war-time fate: facial wounds so grievous he's forced to wear a metal mask.  This man will change Cora's life in wholly unexpected ways.

-Provided by Publisher