Book Review: Until the Next Letter by Hannah Claire

When Rachel and Libby's mom passes away, they are heartbroken. They find a letter that she wrote and left for them, then realize it's the first letter of five. With each letter they read, they learn more about their mother's past, and they uncover some heavy secrets that neither one of them ever suspected.

I'll be honest, I struggled with Linda, the mother who died, a little bit. The girls uncover so many things they had no idea about, and in many instances, I felt as though it would have been much better for her to have just had a conversation with her daughters.  By coming clean after her death, she released herself of the outcome of all the truths the siblings were flooded with. She didn't have to deal with the aftermath of what she had revealed. She didn't have to watch her children come to terms with a new reality because of secrets she'd kept from them.

Still, there's no denying that this is a very sweet novel. It's filled with a lot of love, and the idea that families can be made in a million different ways. Libby was a very likable character. I wasn't sure about Rachel at first, but I grew to like her in short order. The relationship between the siblings, while not terrible to begin with, really bloomed while they took these letters one at a time and fulfilled their mother's wishes. There's romance here, too, and I really liked the obvious love Rachel's husband, Ivan, has for his wife.

This book kept me intrigued throughout. Ms. Claire did a wonderful job of creating characters readers could connect with. I gave this novel four stars. I would recommend this read and am happy I came across it myself.

Why Do I Write So Many Book Reviews???

I've always been a reader. Books are pretty much the first things I can remember about my life. Dr. Seuss was a big deal. I remember the ABC Book. It was white. The A was red, the B was green and the C was blue. There were three strange creatures playing around the letters, and I loved that book. Big A, little A, what begins with a? Aunt Annie's alligator. A … a … A. Perhaps my favorite was Big M, little M … Many mumbling mice are making midnight music in the moonlight ... mighty nice.

It wasn't just the ABC Book. My childhood library was filled with Dr. Seuss, including Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and the crazy tongue twister that is Fox in Socks. One of my most beloved childhood books was The Monster at the End of This Book. Grover. Who doesn't love Grover?

I was an only child for some time. I remember being read to, but I also had to entertain myself a lot. One of the things I liked doing was pulling out my clunky hard plastic turntable—the cover was a boring beige color—and sifting through my collection of Disney Read-Alongs. 

"This is a Disneyland original Little Long-Playing Record, and I am your story reader. I am going to begin now to read the story of [insert title here]. You can read along with me in your book. You will know it's time to turn the page when Tinker Bell rings her little bells like this: (sound of 'chimes' ringing). Let's begin now."

I remember having Cinderella, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Pete's Dragon, and my favorite, Alice in Wonderland. I had such a love affair with this story that I wanted an Alice themed cake for my fifth birthday.

Then I went to school and was introduced to the Bookmobile and the Scholastic Book Fair. Oh, my goodness, the Bookmobile. This was a really big deal for my little book loving heart. My mom would tuck a ten-dollar bill in my pocket, and when I stepped inside that big bus, I was in heaven. I would study all the photos of all the books and stickers coloring the newsprint sheets that were handed out in school from Scholastic. I remember getting those every few months, and I would take my money into my teacher and couldn't wait for her to pull out the great big box weeks later and hand out all the goodies my classmates and I ordered.

Books. Seriously. Is there anything better than books?

I read a lot, but I also wrote. In middle school, I began writing short stories and poetry. I asked for a typewriter one Christmas. You could buy little plastic discs that gave you different fonts. I had the standard type font, but I could switch it to italics. That was cool, but you could also buy typewriter ribbon in different colors.

What? I could type poetry in blue italics! My life was complete! 

Then I wrote my first book. Before I'd even finished it, it was well over 600 pages. I began trying to shop it around to publishing houses. This was in the late 90s, and I didn't have tools at my disposal like the internet. I spent hours sitting in the library scribbling down names and addresses of houses that might be interested in my very long family drama. Because the books that had this information in them were in the research section, I was not allowed to check them out. This is what we call determination.

I wrote so many query letters, and many houses requested I send ten pages, a chapter, the first three chapters. And so, I printed what was requested, and I spent money in postage to send it to them. I got a lot of responses back. No one wanted to publish the book, but one literary agent who read it gave me a lot of very helpful feedback. To this day, I'm grateful for what he wrote to me. (Mark Sullivan, you are awesome. Thank you!) I had a stack of rejection letters and to be honest, it took the wind out of my sails. I didn't finish the book. I wound up putting the project to the side after my husband and I had our first child. And then we had child number two. We'd always planned to homeschool, so I jumped into that with both feet. I made myself a promise that I would finish the book someday, and even if it never got published, at least I could say I completed it. I could say I wrote a book.

The list of authors I enjoyed reading was long. In my freshman year of high school, an English teacher I absolutely loved had us read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was blown away by this book. I loved it so much that for a long time, I reread it yearly. Then, when life happened, and things got rough, I would pull it out again, and reading it consoled me. It's still my favorite book of all time. I also loved reading books written by Dean Koontz. (How many of you read Watchers?) I've never really been a fan of horror novels, but there were a lot of Stephen King books that I loved, too. (Delores Claiborne for example.) I loved mysteries and thrillers and read the Inspector Lynley series by Elizabeth George, the Kay Scarpetta books by Patricia Cornwell, the goofy Stephanie Plum books written by Janet Evanovich, and the magic realism of Sarah Addison Allen's books. James Lee Burke. Wow. I absolutely love the way James Lee Burke writes, and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. I was reading V.C. Andrews at thirteen—yikes, but I certainly wasn't the only tween reading those books—and then there was Judy Blume. Thank God for Judy Blume. There's so many. I'll stop here, but I could keep going. Like I said before, there's nothing better than books. 

When I took on the gigantic responsibility of educating two children, I continued to read, but it was instructive books that sat on my nightstand instead of the latest Michael Crichton. I learned how to build a curriculum that suited the county we happened to live in at the time, and I even took a job with a small publication called Kids 411. I became a homeschool liaison, writing articles and sharing with other parents all the information I had gathered about being a homeschool family. (This was in 2003, and Colorado was not a big homeschool state at that time. Maya had a lot of friends she danced and did gymnastics with, and none of them were homeschooled. I was largely on my own, and I was okay with that. I was good at homeschooling. I absolutely loved being a homeschool mom.)

For many years, the authors I read came from a very different list. Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Audrey Wood and Laura Joffe Numeroff. I read Mary Pope Osborne, Marcus Pfister, E.B. White, C.S. Lewis and Jane Yolen. I read Room on the Broom, Sheep in a Jeep, The Mermaid's Baby, Goodnight Moon and Chrysanthemum. The kids and I would go to the library at least twice a week. They didn't have a cap on how many books could be checked out, and neither did I. I read at least four books to them at bedtime every single night. We took books with us everywhere we went just in case there was time during errands or long car rides when they got bored. I read a whole lot of books from the back seat of many cars. Children's books. They are magical.

When our oldest was about twelve, I finally finished writing that first novel. (The finished version was nowhere near 600 pages by the way.) This time, I didn't try to sell it, I published it on my own. I went through a publisher called Xlibris. They taught me a lot, but they charged a great deal of money to do so. If I had to do it over again, I would not have gone this route, but it did make it possible for me to decide to publish and then be published. That was at the end of 2012. I learned a lot that next year about the ins and outs of having a book on the market. This was when I found out how important the almighty review is.

Let me blunt. Reviews are everything. Every author needs them, and they are so very difficult to get. Sites like Amazon advertise books with a lot of reviews, and literary agents and publishing houses look at the number of reviews to gauge how popular—and how financially profitable—a certain title might become. I repeat: REVIEWS ARE EVERYTHING.

As a new author, I had no reviews. I did know how to research, though, and I found a review group on Goodreads. It turned out to be a great group. Books were grouped according to genre, and each reviewing period lasted about two months. In order to get four reviews, you had to be willing to read four books and write and post four reviews. None of the reviews were reciprocal, so I was never asked to review a book by an author who had written a review for me. There was never any crossover. They were honest reviews. (I did this for my first two books, and some of the reviews I received were awful—but they were helpful. I'd rather have an honest review and be able to learn from it than to be told a book is fantastic when it isn't.) I was part of this group for about two years, and I met a lot of great authors. I also got to read many amazing—and some not so amazing—books. I'm not in the group any longer, but it still exists thirteen years after I first discovered it.

There are a lot of authors publishing books. Some of them are traditionally published. Some of them are attached to smaller publishing houses, and some of them—like mine—are published by indie authors. The one thing every single one of these books has in common is that they all need reviews. 

I decided that if I was going to ask for reviews, I was going to write reviews.

One of the reviews I wrote that garnered the most attention was for Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. I never write a review hoping someone will comment on it. In fact, at the time, I didn't realize that was a thing, so the response it got took me by surprise. This book is number twelve in the Kay Scarpetta series. I had been an avid reader of this series, until I got to the twelfth book. She chose to do something with her characters that didn't sit well with me, and I was hesitant to read further. I felt guilty about this. I'd been loyal to this writer and this series, but I was struggling with it all. I decided to look at some of the reviews about this book to see what other readers were saying about it—and I was horrified by some of the things I saw.

People, specifically when they have any amount of anonymity, can be incredibly mean and rude. That's not something I believe in. I don't write mean reviews. Does this mean I give four and five stars to every book I read? Absolutely not. Does this mean there haven't been books I chose to skim quickly instead of actually reading because I found no interest in them? Nope. I won't say I thought a book was good if I didn't think it was. But I always find something I liked about a book—perhaps the author's humor, maybe a phrase or two stood out, maybe it was a character, or the premise of the story—it could be something really small, and I'll be sure to write about it. I'll say the book didn't work for me, but that I'm sure there are others who will feel differently. You can say you didn't care for something without being a jerk about it. There were a lot of people being jerks about Blow Fly.

I revisited the Kay Scarpetta series. I reread all the books, including book twelve. I'll be honest—it still hit me the same way it did the first time I read it. I sat and put my thoughts and feelings down—not just about the book, but about the other reviews it had received. I think it would be really amazing if Patricia Cornwell stumbled across my review one day. I'd love to know what she thought of it. 

I write reviews because authors need reviews. I write reviews because I, as an author, desperately need reviews. One of the cool things about it is, by sitting down and putting your ideas about a book into a single sentence or several paragraphs, you're challenging your brain to write in a different way. It's not storytelling. It's a different kind of practice. The more you write, the better you become at it. Writing reviews is a great tool for an author.

You don't have to do anything special to leave a review for an author. You read a book, you jot a few ideas about what you liked and what you didn't about the book. You may not hear a thank you, but I can guarantee that author will be grateful. Authors oftentimes pay companies to help them find people who will read their books and leave reviews. I do. I go through Booksprout. I pay a fee every year to have books listed on that site, and I offer them to readers free of charge in return for honest reviews. It doesn't cost a reader anything to have an account with Booksprout. They get free books, the author gets reviews. It's a win/win. 

There are other companies that do this as well. At the beginning of 2026, I decided I was going to start reading for NetGalley. I look for specific authors, and a lot of my favorites use NetGalley. One of the things I've come to enjoy most about reading for them, though, is finding authors that are new to me, or authors who have just written their first book. It's so cool to stumble across so many brilliant novels that I otherwise would have never found. An author I know decided to use BookSirens to help her get reviews a couple of months ago. I joined to support her, but once I was a member, I just decided to keep reading for other authors on the site. I couldn't possibly name all the companies who offer books for reviews, but I know it wouldn't take much research for anyone to find them.

Honestly, logging into NetGalley or BookSirens today gives me a similar feeling to stepping up into the Bookmobile or looking through the flyers from Scholastic back in elementary school. Do you know how many books there are just waiting to be read??? It's almost more than I can fathom. 

I read on average about three to four books a month, and I review every one of them. When I brought this blog back to life, I decided I would use it to help get the word out on the books I've been able to review. I post them on my Facebook page, as well as on Instagram. Readers are everywhere. Perhaps this post will urge one or two of them to go and find one of my books and leave a review for me. :) 

Book Review: The Version We Kept by Nicole Pigeon

 

The Version We Kept is told from the viewpoint of Eliza Vale who, at the beginning of the novel, is sitting in her car in the parking lot of a funeral home. Inside, the services for Bennett Vale are about to begin. We are introduced to several people all at once, although the relationship between them all is not always clear.  The cast of characters is large—about twelve people—and not all of them are still alive. The author does a good job letting us know that this is a tight knit family, and they are gathering to say goodbye to Bennett. The fact that they are all related is the relevant part, and later, the relationship between a couple of them becomes the heart of the whole story.

Every summer, the Vale family travels to Alder House on Lake Bellweather in Ontario, Canada. Alder House is old and weathered. It is filled with a bunch of bedrooms, a big kitchen, a front porch and an archival room. This room is filled with shelves stacked with boxes of negatives, photographs, cassette tapes containing the voices of the Vale family, videos and files of important documents such as birth certificates, deeds to property, contracts and other necessary things. These things have been meticulously kept over the years, mostly by Eleanor—who is no longer living—and Evelyn. Bennett played the part of archivist sometime in the past, and this year, Eliza is the one who is chosen for the job. She arrives at the lake and prepares to continue the tradition of familial archiving—but finds that negatives have been altered, tapes spliced and several different copies of documents, each one with small differences. It becomes obvious to Eliza that the Vale family history has been carefully edited over the years.

When Eliza finds a cassette tape from Bennett, she realizes that it's not part of the archive but left for the next person who is elected to tend to the collection. Tears came to my eyes just like they did Eliza's. "Promise me if I die, you won't make me prettier than I was. People always do that. I don't want it. If you have to choose, leave the rough parts in. That's what's real." This is the whole idea behind this powerhouse of a novel.

There are other details I'd love to share in this review, but to do so would be revealing too much. This is really a book a reader needs to experience on their own. Pigeon did not simply tell a story, she also created atmosphere. You can hear the sounds of the old hardwoods creaking and feel the way the grain of the wood might feel to the soles of bare feet. You can smell the cedar of the shelves in the archive room and smell the petrichor after a storm while the cooler air surrounds you and envelops you in a cloud of humidity. She is good at pulling in all senses and immersing the reader as she writes.

This was an emotional read. Events that have taken place in the Vale family find no real conclusion—at least not while the reader is part of the story. A bigger revelation, however, is discovered, and the end of this tale brings a quiet kind of satisfaction.

Book Review: Nowhere Safe by Kate Anslinger

 

Sloane Keller is a flight attendant working for Velocity Airlines. The job has its drawbacks—mostly due to troublesome passengers—but she's always on the move, travelling all over the globe. This is a good thing for Sloane because she's got a past she's running away from. Everything seems to be going fine until one of the passengers calls her by her real name. Does this man know what happened that night at the river? Does he know what Sloane did?

Anslinger layers this story in such an interesting way. I was held to the story, and found myself surprised not once, but several times. And she hit me with yet another surprise with the very last line of the book. Anslinger has definitely mastered the fine art of a well-crafted thriller.

I wanted to feel closer to Sloane. I desperately wanted to find out the secrets of her past, but I never felt the emotional closeness to her that I desired. I'm not sure why I couldn't connect, and I don't really know if that took away from the story. I liked all the puzzle pieces that Anslinger clicked into place throughout and would recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a twisty thriller.

The cover art is worth mentioning. It's so very well done. 

I gave Nowhere Safe four stars.

Book Review: Everything He Never Told Me by Clara van Houten

 

Everything He Never Told Me is a story about Kai Lindholm, a brilliant engineer who wants to build prosthetics for veterans, and Ivy, the woman he loves. Ivy is the daughter of a very wealthy and domineering father who has a plan for her life. Kai is not in those plans. Even though her father wants her to marry another man named Mason, Ivy accepts Kai's proposal, and the two of them get married and begin their lives without the money Ivy has always been used to. The couple both believe in Kai's ability to build a prosperous business, and together they work toward that goal. Life, as it oftentimes does, throws them a curve ball, and things don't quite go according to plan.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this book when I started reading but hearing it both in Kai's voice and then in Ivy's was interesting. I knew something wasn't quite right as I read, and I think van Houten did a great job of leading us down the very scary, difficult path of deteriorating mental health and grief. Hearing the story from both sides was a creative way to show readers how things were declining. I don't have firsthand experience with the particular circumstances the characters found themselves in, but from what I do know about it, it feels like the author does her subject matter justice.

I'll be honest. When I finished reading, I needed to be in a quiet place for a while so the story could settle in my head. It was heartbreaking. Oh my goodness. Truly heartbreaking. The relationship between Kai and Ivy is the whole heart of this novel, but honestly, the romance didn't feel much like a romance. As I write this, however, I'm wondering if that was the whole point. The relationship was toxic, and that was illustrated well. I find myself wondering how Ivy is doing now and how much time has passed for her since the end of this part of her story. That right there tells me van Houten was able to tell me a tale that I'm still thinking about after putting the book down. I'd call that a success. 

I gave this book four stars. This title releases on August 18th.

Book Review: Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

 

In this novel, Chamberlain takes readers back to North Carolina in the early sixties. Jane Forrester is a newlywed, married to a pediatrician who is more than a little status conscious. He wants a stay-at-home wife and children, but Jane wants a career. Against his better judgement, he allows this to happen, thinking she will tire of it quickly and they can start their family.

She takes a job as a social worker and is introduced to two families who work and live on a tobacco farm. She is told from the very beginning not to open her heart to the clients she has been assigned to, but this is not in Jane's programming. Immediately, she becomes emotionally involved with fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart, Ivy's diabetic grandmother, her beautiful but mentally challenged older sister, and her nephew, Baby William. When Jane learns that Mary Ella, Ivy's sister, was unknowingly part of a state program that sterilizes what they deem to be “mental defectives,” and others with supposedly undesirable characteristics, she is taken by surprise. Then she is told that because of her epilepsy, Ivy will become part of the program as well. The more she gets to know the girl, the more she learns about her, including Ivy's dream to become a mother one day.

Chamberlain weaves fiction and history together beautifully in Necessary Lies. This topic is a difficult one, and this story is not without pain and struggle. I loved the way things came to a close. It was a happy ending but disturbing at the same time. It was real and sad and lovely all at once.