Diane Chamberlain writes compelling fiction that features young female protagonists striving to prevail in a world that proves to be hostile towards them for reasons that are revealed as the stories progress. Her novels captivate the reader as ...
Essays
Minka Kent, an Author Study
Minka Kent writes psychological suspense novels that draw the reader in from the word “go.” Delving into her novels could almost be considered a delectable guilty pleasure except the author's ...
The Courage to Create
In the early 1980s when I studied choreography with Dr. Alma Hawkins at Santa Monica Community College, The Courage to Create by Rollo May was on the reading list for the class. You may wonder: Why ...
How Storytelling Can Guide Us: On Toni Morrison’s “God Help the Child”
As we near the end of 2017, our country continues to be embroiled in this year’s sexual harassment scandals from “How stupid could he have been to grope the air in front of a sleeping woman’s ...
Liu Xiaobo: Tyranny, Freedom of Conscience, and the Incompleteness of the Individual
“The unique thing about man is that he is capable of being aware of his tragic fate; he can be aware of the fact that he will die; he can be aware that the ultimate meaning of the universe and life ...
Florence Osmund – Author Study
Florence Osmund writes layered novels centered on characters trying to find home in a literal and figurative sense. The novels explore how integral family is to each character and how family can ...
When you find the book to inspire you
Sometimes a book will appear in my life for a reason. Perhaps this is the case more often than not and the reason I picked up My Beloved World when I did and read it when I did. Justice Sotomayor’s ...
1984 – Has Orwell’s World Arrived?
When I was fourteen or fifteen, a group of classmates and I read four books within a few months: 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World and Lord of the Flies. Our young minds were seeking, exploring, and ...
Regret and relationship in the fiction of Maria Savva
Maria Savva brings the reader deeply into the human conscience and inner psyche of her characters. Her fiction expertly weaves moral ambiguities, deep-seated memories, and modern challenges into ...
Memories from my bookshelf
Sometimes unread books on a bookshelf are as good as a diary entry to jog the memory. You look at the spine of a novel you bought twenty years ago at the Strand bookstore in New York. You were with so ...
The Journey of a Novel
After taking a couple of non-credit creative writing classes at our local university in the early 2000s, some fellow students and I formed a critique group. We got together every other Thursday night, ...
Reading is Personal
My mother taught me to read simple sentences by the time I was three. And from then on I was required to read a book a week, any book but it had to be challenging, until about the 7th grade. When I ...
Readers and Writers: A Dance of Reciprocity
Reading is like exercise. You have to practice it. Call it the sit-down practice of exercising your mental and emotional acuities. Even though you aren’t sweating while you turn the pages, you are ...
A Bookworm’s Travelogue
My parents were avid readers, for which I am very grateful. I have loved reading from an early age, thanks to strong encouragement in my household. We had books everywhere, and I relished those ...
The Longform Book Review
The longform book review on bookscover2cover is a combination of narrative, descriptive, and analytical style and is typically more than 1500 words in length. In this essay by founder Sandra Fluck, we ...