Review #720: I Didn't Expect to be Expecting by Richa S Mukherjee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It's a great thing about being pregnant - you don't need excuses to pee or to eat.

----Angelina Jolie

Richa S Mukherjee, an Indian author, has penned an extremely hilarious and a captivating tale about motherhood and its mistakes in her new book, I Didn't Expect to be Expecting. This book revolves around a happily married, cool couple who amidst of their busy jobs, meeting deadlines and tackling weird bosses and colleagues in office, they always find time for each other and also for their crazy set of friends, and a kid is no where close in their 5 years blissfully married life's radar, until they become pregnant, and gradually their perfect life takes a slippery road and so the protagonist's body and mind.

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Review #707: Fall from Grace by Danielle Steel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”

----Albert Camus

Danielle Steel, the #1 bestselling author, is back with her new adult fiction book called, Fall from Grace that revolves around a mid-aged woman whose perfect life shatters when her husband dies but the worst part is that, after his death, she finds herself homeless and jobless. With little luck, she gets in the fashion industry, only to be falsely incriminated in a legal case by a trustworthy friend, despite her daughters' several warnings about her friend, but can she pick up the pieces of her life and rebuild it? Steele's new book will leave the readers heartbroken, as the protagonist's life is struck by one bad luck after another.

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Review #694: The Fisher Queen's Dynasty by Kavita Kané

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.”

----Krishna Dharma

Kavita Kané, an Indian bestselling author, has penned an inspiring and extremely compelling mythological tale inspired from the characters from the Indian epic mythology, Mahabharata in her new book called, The Fisher Queen's Dynasty that revolves around two key protagonists, one ordinary woman, denied of her royal birth-right who grows up under the care of a meager-fisherman, and later claims to the throne of Hastinapur by her clever tricks, but sadly she becomes a pawn to the dirty politics of the state, turning her into a bitter and wicked queen and the other, a handsome prince, who is the true heir to the throne to Hastinapur, but he sacrifices away his chance to become the king in order to fulfill his father's romantic wishes to marry a fisher-girl. The woman is known as Satyavati, the grandmother to Pandu and Dhritarashtra and the man is known as Bhism, the son of Ganga.

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Review #692: A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“If I were asked to define Motherhood. I would have defined it as Love in its purest form. Unconditional Love.”

----Revathi Sankaran

Amulya Malladi, a bestselling Indian author, has penned a thoroughly refreshing and alluring contemporary fiction called, A House for Happy Mothers that surrounds around two women, one wants a baby desperately thus choosing the surrogate route to India away from her posh Silicon valley life with her darling husband and aristocrat friends, and the other is desperate to provide a good schooling and education to her highly intelligent son and also to keep the wolves away from the doorstep of her poor household by selling her womb. A journey that connects two mothers in different yet in emotionally similar ways that is vivid, raw and extremely heart-touching to read about.

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Review #645: Red Maize by Danesh Rana

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.”

----Abhijit Naskar

Danesh Rana, an Indian Police Service officer of Jammu and Kashmir cadre, has penned a vividly compelling tale about Jammu and not Kashmir, the metaphor of this heavenly paradise and its ever growing militants, which we rarely hear of from the hills of Jammu, in his debut book called, Red Maize. This book narrates the tale of three Muslim brothers and their headstrong and brave mother set across the idyllic mountainous landscape of Jammu, where the middle brother joins his hands with the militants to free his land from the Indian Armed Forces, caught between the crossfires of the jihads and the Indian Armed Forces are the innocent people of the land.

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Review #641: You Don't Know Me but I Know You by Rebecca Barrow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Anyone who ever wondered how much they could love a child who did not spring from their own loins, know this: it is the same. The feeling of love is so profound, it's incredible and surprising.”

----Nia Vardalos

Rebecca Barrow, an English author, has penned a heart warming and extremely compelling debut teen fiction called, You Don't Know Me but I Know You that is centered around a young high school teenager, who has a loving adoptive family, great friends and a charming and kind musician boyfriend and both are looking forward to their future excitedly, but then this young teenage girl's life changes when she has to make difficult decision that her birth mother made for her a decade ago. This story is all about families, love, friendships, choices, motherhood and ultimately about honesty above everything.

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Review #627: Secrets of Nanreath Hall by Alix Rickloff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

----Søren Kierkegaard

Alix Rickloff, a critically acclaimed author of historical and paranormal romance, has penned a heart touching historical fiction called, Secrets of Nanreath Hall that revolves around two women, in two different timelines, searching for their own identities, one is looking for her biological mother's family and her forgotten background, while the other leaves everything behind for love. Both the stories, narrated in alternative chapters, are not only endearing but are also intriguing enough to keep the readers on their edges.

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Review #625: One Little Mistake by Emma Curtis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”

----Friedrich Nietzsche

Emma Curtis, a British writer, pens her debut psychological thriller called, One Little Mistake that revolves around a woman, who is a mother of three beautiful children, wife to a husband who loves her a lot and with a job she loves, but her perfect life has cracks and those cracks make her slip, as she commits one tiny little mistake, which she later confides to her beat friend, who in turn, asks her to keep lying in order to save her kids from child protection services and little did this woman knew that a terrible calamity was waiting at her front door, the moment she confided in her best friend. A story about two best friends and a little girl, who just lost her mother and is forced to go to foster care.

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Review #624: Against All Odds by Danielle Steel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“The only love that I really believe in is a mother’s love for her children.”

----Karl Lagerfeld

Danielle Steel, the #1 bestselling author, is back with her new adult fiction book called, Against All Odds that unravels the story of a widowed mother and her four children, who are now adults, and whose terrible life's choices land them up in a mucky situation, yet the mother, who already warned them against their decisions, stands strongly by their side, and fights for them against all odds, even though her own personal life goes haywire. A story that vividly portrays the parent's undying support for their children, no matter what.

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Review #617: The Child by Fiona Barton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.”

----Asa Don Brown

Fiona Barton, the British bestselling author, is back with another page-turning and chilling psychological thriller called, The Child that revolves around three women, one our favorite journalist from Barton's previous book, Kate, and two different women, each grieving upon the news of an infant's skeletons recovered from a building site, as one strongly believes that it is her baby stolen the day she gave birth to her baby while the other is terrified about her long buried past has finally come to haunt her, can Kate uncover the mystery behind two women's grief?

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Review #615: The Forever Summer by Jamie Brenner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“The thing about families was that there was always some question nobody wanted to answer for you, and it was like a stray thread pulling loose in a sweater. You could tug at it all you wanted, but in the end, all you'd have was a pile of twisted yarn.”

----Sarah Sullivan

Jamie Brenner, an American author, has penned a compelling family drama in her new contemporary fiction, The Forever Summer that centers around three generations of women, all tied up together in a web of long buried family secrets, that unravel this summer to bring them closer to the summer house in order to reunite and find one another about their past and the untold secrets and stories, the two half sisters and the mother and the grandfather, all connected with one single link, so read this book to find out now.

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Review #603: Good as Gone by Amy Gentry

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“I thought about how there are two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you don't dare to let out.”

----Ally Carter

Amy Gentry, an American author, pens her debut psychological thriller called, Good as Gone which is nothing close to Flynn's Gone Girl instead it has a killer plot that revolves around a daughter and a mother, whose elder daughter gets abducted from her home at the age of 13 without a trace and with an eye witness of her younger sister, but eight years later, on the homecoming day of the younger sister from her summer break in her college, someone rings the doorbell of that home, where the elder girl was abducted from.

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Review #599: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


“There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.”

----Katherine Owen

Paula Hawkins, the British international best-selling author, is back with her new psychological thriller, Into the Water that revolves around a small British town and on its ugly history of women drowning themselves into a pool, followed by the consequences and the mysteries they leave behind for their family and the townsfolk to live with it. Unfortunately, this book fails to live up to readers' expectation yet I think this story is going to survive for a pretty long time because this book is going to release while basking in the glory of the author's debut globally best-selling thriller, The Girl on the Train.

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Review #595: South Haven by Hirsh Sawhney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

----Jalaluddin Rumi

Hirsh Sawhney, an Indian-American author, has penned a heart touching family drama in his debut contemporary fiction, South Haven that revolves around a fictional town about an Indian-American young boy trying to cope with the loss of his mother in a household that is going to hit the rock bottom pretty soon, if he doesn't take up the responsibilities, all the while keeping his feelings about growing up, religious extremism, teenage angst, friendships, peer pressure and relationships under control.

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Review #587: The Innocent by Harlan Coben

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

----Marcus Aurelius

Harlan Coben, an international bestselling author, has penned a hypnotizing crime thriller, The Innocent in which the author has spun a tale about an ex-con whose after prison life has turned out to be surprisingly good, but unfortunately his dream life threatens to come crashing down when a video featuring his wife is sent to his phone by his wife, and parallely, one murder occurs after another and young cop is trying to connecting the dots of these murders while another teenager tries to dig up the past of her murdered mother and must punish her killers.

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Review #585: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“If you are cold, tea will warm you;
if you are too heated, it will cool you;
If you are depressed, it will cheer you;
If you are excited, it will calm you.”

----William Ewart Gladstone

Lisa See, a Chinese-American NY Times Bestselling author, crafts an unique and heart-touching story, called The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane in which the author introduces her readers yet with another ethnic minority group of China, called the Akha, whose religion lies in their beliefs, taboos and superstitions chalked out by old shamans and ancient relics, and among this group of people, there lies a particular tea-growing family, the youngest daughter of that family, break frees from those old beliefs and maps her own future as a tea seller, but pain always manages to find a way to hurt her.

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Review #584: Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is the beating of my heart. I cannot now imagine a life without her.”

----Kristin Hannah

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the best selling, award-winning author, has penned a terrific and heart rending grandmother-mother-daughter relationship drama in her new book, Before We Visit the Goddess that revolves around three woman bound together by blood yet separated by generation gaps. The author has narrated a longing tale of mistakes, misunderstandings spanning through three generations from Indian to USA reflecting how one mistake of one ambitious woman, who wanted to make a name for her family, cost her only daughter's choices that finally impacted her granddaughter's course of life.

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Review #568: Show Me A Mountain by Kerry Young

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


“We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.”

----Rick Warren

Kerry Young, a Chinese African author, pens an incredibly heart breaking historical fiction, Show Me A Mountain that is set across the tropical Jamaican backdrop and it revolves around the life story of a half Chinese and half African woman growing up in an affluent household with a loving but non-caring father with ugly businesses and a mother with a terribly impulsive rage and that she deliberately ushered upon her little daughter. A story of losing love and again finding it through an exotic country and learning to forgive the past.

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Review #566: Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”

----Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Harlan Coben, an international bestselling author, has penned yet another engrossing and riveting thriller, Fool Me Once that revolves around a former female Army soldier who sees her dead husband on their two year old daughter's room's nanny cam, two days after the funeral of her husband who has been shot dead by the robbers in front of his wife's eyes. But trust if the big thing that is nagging at the back of the female soldier's mind, unraveling the truth might lead her to a dark, ugly path.

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Review #560: The Secret of a Heart Note by Stacey Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own”

----Fernando Pessoa

Stacey Lee, a Chinese-American author, pens a charming tale of young love and perfume in her new young adult book, The Secret of a Heart Note that revolves around a teenage perfume maker, who has a nose for each individual's scent and can customize that perfume into love elixir to make people fall in love with one another, but her magic comes with a price of never falling in love with anyone, but the girl desires of a normal life with a high school, boyfriend and social reputation.

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