Jen Miller

About this time last year, I was reading a novel by Carl Hiaasen, the ultimate writer of Florida men, while lounging in the Florida sun. This week, I read a novel by Carl Hiassen while lying under multiple blankets on my couch in New Jersey, a state that feels like it has been stuck on permanent gray for the last six weeks. This photo, which I took in my bathroom, matches the general vibe (though after telling myself I wasn’t making my annual trek south this year, I cracked. Expect a Florida-themed photo on this site next month).

This time around, the Hiaasen book of choice is Lucky You, a 1997 novel about two people who win the lottery. One is JoLayne Lucks, an animal lover who plans to use a portion of her winnings to buy and preserve a plot of undeveloped land so it won’t be paved over. The other is Bode, an asshole who wants to use the money to fund a white nationalist militia.

They each had a ticket for one $28 million jackpot, but Bode, being an asshole, gets greedy and decides $14 million isn’t enough. He has his equally assholish friend Chub (they go […]

And we’re back on the Murder, She Wrote boat! Or a lobster boat, as is the case with Murder, She Wrote: The Maine Mutiny. This 2005 entry into the Murder, She Wrote literary oeuvre opens with Fletcher stuck in an abandoned lobster boat with a dead body. She doesn’t remember how she got there, thanks to someone (she assumes the person who did the murdering) hitting her on the head.

That’s the middle of this story, which then jumps back to what lead to be a controversy among lobstermen in the first place (and it is ALL men here), then to Fletcher being stuck on the boat, and of course unraveling the mystery of how she got there in the first place.

It’s…fine, as were the other books I read in the series last year. They’re a fine way to pass the time without breaking your brain, especially if you’re okay was sometimes floral writing. One example: “Although the evening was arm enough for a shirt alone, he wore a leather jacket with the sleeves pushed up, revealing tattoos on both forearms. There was a sharp crease in his trousers and a high shine in on his intricately patterned […]

Happy New Year! With the turning of the calendar starts a new year of book reviews. Writing this blog last year was a joy, and a much needed kick in the pants to get me to think about writing for writing’s sake — and not writing just stuff I was being paid for (though I do have a tip jar, and I get a cut if you order any books from the links, just putting that out there!) So here I am again, ready to read another 52 books (or so), while matching my nail polish to the covers, and writing about it all here.

First up for 2023 is The Winter Guest by Pam Jenoff. She writes historical fiction surrounding World World II, with an informed point of view: before becoming a best selling author, she worked as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army and then for the State Department where, for a time, she was assigned to the U.S. consulate in Krakow, Poland.

It was that work that informed The Winter Guest, which is about twin sisters living in a fictional rural town outside of Krakow in 1940. After their father dies and their mother […]

And here we have it, the last book of the year: Beauty Tempts the Beast by Lorraine Heath. And it’s…fine.

I wasn’t in much of a reading mood this week, despite being a person who always has a book. I started and stopped two books before I got to this one. Beauty Tames the Beast isn’t terrible, but it feels a bit like Heath ran out of gas. This is the sixth book in the “A Sins for All Seasons” season. There’s a out of nowhere plot twist in the last 100 pages. Of course our hero and heroine get together, but the “final” hurdle to them doing so feels low stakes. But it’s done and on the shelf of the books I read this year.

Looking back on my reading in 2022, it feels…fine? I haven’t written this blog in a while, and it did force me to be more thoughtful about my choices, and to try to read authors of different backgrounds, which of course isn’t a bad thing.

I keep the (physical) books I read through the year together. Tomorrow I’ll break this down and decide what to keep, what to offer friends and what to donate. But doesn’t […]

The funny thing about A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is that I’ve had this for almost three years, but avoided reading it because I assumed it would be a heavy book. It’s a Russian novel! But when I saw a friend write online that her blood pressure dropped every time she read it, I gave it a go. I’m glad I did.

It’s about Count Alexander Rostov, who, at age 30, is sentenced to house arrest. The “house” in this case is the Metropol hotel in Moscow in 1922. A Bolshevik tribunal determined he was an unrepentant aristocrat, but spared his life because of a poem he wrote 1913. Instead, he is sent to live out his days in the belfry of this luxury hotel near the Kremlin.

Alexander makes the most of it, living a full, often delightful life inside. My friend was right: I did feel soothed every time I opened the book. It was a warm friend on some of the shortest nights of the year.

I’m pretty sure I bought this on March 14, 2020, when were were told if we stayed home two weeks, the whole COVID-19 thing would blow over (I know the date […]