Book Review: A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3) by Maddie Day

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A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3)  by Maddie Day  opens with the city of Colinas, California celebrating Memorial Day weekend with various activities including a car show and picnic. While co-sponsoring a booth at the car show with local mechanic Josie Jarvin, Cece witnesses one of the attendees, Regan Greene, getting into multiple arguments with others. Aside from that, everything goes well. That is until the next morning when the town finds out that Regan is dead, and it looks like she was murdered. With multiple people having motives, Cece utilizes her amateur sleuthing skills to find out who actually committed the dirty deed. I was approved for and received a digital copy of an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of A Poisonous Pour by Maddie Day from NetGalley and Kensington Publishing. A huge thank you goes out to both for providing me a copy for free in exchange for my honest opinion. Maddie Day's Cece Barton series has become one of my favorite cozy mystery series, an...
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Book Review: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

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Goodreads ARC Book Review of The Book Seller by Cynthia Swanson
The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson opens in Denver, Colorado in the year 1962. Readers are introduced to friends Kitty Miller and Freida, who own and operate a bookstore in Downtown Denver. Following Kitty's life as a single, working woman in the 1960's, she places a personal ad in the local newspaper to meet "Mr. Right" and gives her cast offs to Freida. Then, the dreams begin ... Katharyn Andersson is married to the perfect man, Lars, and they have three children. To Katharyn, it's the perfect life, the one she longs for. Each time she dreams, the more real it is. As her worlds begin to blur, Kitty doesn't know which one is reality and which one is imagined. Which one will she choose?

Let me begin by being upfront ... I won an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson in Goodreads.com's First Reads Giveaway in exchange for my honest review of the book.

Third time's a charm, right? It took me THREE attempts to finish reading Cynthia Swanson's The Bookseller, but on that third try, something clicked, and I couldn't put the book down. Fair warning, there are some minor spoilers below.

Autism is a minor theme throughout the book. The way the characters handled and reacted to autistic kids took me by surprise and saddened me. No one seemed how to interact with these children. What's even more surprising is the doctor said that autism is caused by mothers who don't show their babies enough love and don't hold them enough. I surely hope this wasn't really the way doctors thought in the 1960's.

book review of the bookseller by cynthia swanson
Another interesting element in The Bookseller is the societal limitations placed on women. Kitty and Freida couldn't get a loan from the bank to open their bookstore without a male helping them. They had to borrow money from Freida's father. Were single women really unable to take out a loan in the sixties? If so, it makes me that more thankful to live in a day and age where this wouldn't be an issue.

Racism is also addressed, particularly within Kitty's dream world as Katharyn where she and Lars employ "colored help", language used intentionally by the author to reflect the time period. These scenes felt reminiscent of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which disappointed me.

Not so surprising was when the author revealed the sexuality of Freida. The author provided ample foreshadowing making it feel more confirmatory than shocking.

All in all, I enjoyed The Bookseller and would recommend it to other people. It was an entertaining, easy read that I gave a rating of three out of five stars.

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Location: Denver, CO, USA

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