Book Review: Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18) by Lee Hollis

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Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18)  by Lee Hollis  opens with Tom Farley and his neighbors in a snit because he's the last holdout to sell his house to a property developer who wants to build a resort. When Tom is shot at a pre-Thanksgiving community gathering and hospitalized, Hayley Powell puts her amateur sleuthing skills to good use. Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishers for providing me with an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of this cozy mystery. I received a copy of this book for free in exchange of my honest opinion and review of the story. I loved the fact that this latest installment of the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery  series had a theme around the Thanksgiving holiday and included live turkeys in the plot. It was good to visit some familiar characters. Since this is the eighteenth installment in the series, Lee Hollis didn't go into much detail of the background of those reoccurring characters; however, she...
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Book Review: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

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book review kindred octavia e butler

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is the first science fiction novel written by a Black woman and is part memoir, part fantasy, and part historical fiction. The book opens with Dana, an African American woman in 1976 Los Angeles, California, who is transported back to 1815 Maryland and saves a drowning white boy.  However, she finds herself fearing for her life when the boys father, a slave owner, is pointing his shotgun at her.

This is a novel that was selected by the book club I belong to for our September Book Club Meeting.  I had heard of Kindred but had no idea what it was about.  I don't read a lot of science fiction because I typically don't enjoy it.  However, I was pleasantly surprised how intriguing the story was, and it sucked me in from the start.

Well-written.  Engaging.  Unputdownable.  These are just some of the words that I'd use to describe Octavia E. Butler's Kindred.  I find myself still thinking about the book long after finishing it.  The characters were brought to life so well that I felt I was right there with them.  The author does a phenomenal job at showing the reader what slavery was like and what might happen if a Black person from today's time was sucked into an America that still had slavery.  Although this is a work of fiction, it feels like it really happened mostly because of the situations being very real things that took place in American history.  Additional themes in this novel include racism, rape, and suicide.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler has definitely stood the test of time.  It's hard to believe that it was published a little over 43 years ago.  I give it five out of five stars, and I'll definitely be reading the author's other works.


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