Season of the Dragonflies, by Sarah Creech. HarperCollins 2014 If you took Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume’ and mixed it with Alice Hoffman’s, well, any of her books, you might come up with ‘Season of the Dragonflies’. In the 1920s, on a tropical island, Serena Lenore discovers a magical variety of gardenia, which not only smells divine but also ( Read more... )

Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me, by Patricia Volk. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013
When I picked up this book, I thought that the author’s mother was perhaps friends with Schiaparelli and that she had grown up with both women in her life. No, it turns out,, neither mother nor daughter ever met the imaginative designer- the only connection was that ( Read more... )

Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See. Random House, 2011 I’ve been a fan of Lisa See’s ever since I read the non-fiction history of her family, “On Gold Mountain”, so the opportunity to get an advanced reader copy of ‘Dreams of Joy’ was exciting for me. The book did not disappoint ( Read more... )