My Review:  “It’s never too late to be who you might have been,” as George Eliot is supposed to have said. She’s certainly someone who would have known, whether she actually said it or not. In the summer of 1969, Eleanor Bell Strickland may not remember the phrase - because she’s been having more than a few problems with her memories of her own life these days - but she’s hoping it’s true all the same. And that it’s not too late for her to try, not so much in spite of being 69 herself, but because she’s just learned the reason why her memory has felt like Swiss cheese for longer than she’d care to admit.

My Review: I picked this up because I LOVED the author’s first book, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library and was hoping for more just like it. That particular book is one of my favorites among the current trend of mostly light, slightly bittersweet, loosely linked stories that are more about healing and interconnected relationships than they are anything else.

My Review: There are two sayings about home, and they usually contradict each other. There’s the one about home being the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in, and the one that says you can’t go home again. Darby never thought he’d want to go back to his tiny Illinois hometown, but he’s about to turn 30, the start-up he’s been working for has just folded, and the rent on his New York City shoebox apartment is going up at the end of the month to a point he couldn’t even have afforded when he was working.

My Review: There are a whole series, actually series-es, that are very similar to this one, often translated from either Korean or Japanese. Generally, they are feel good stories about small acts of kindness and building community, set around an unlikely or out of the way place that manifests just for people who need it. Some of those stories, like…

My Review: The idea seems a bit, well, absurd - but in a good way. That a person would ‘rent’ a cat for three days and then return the cat. Actually, that’s not the absurd part. There are lots of reasons why someone would want a cat as a short term rental, and quite a few of them are covered in this collection.

My Review: I picked this up for three reasons. First and foremost, the first book in the series, the titular We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, was adorable. Second, the cover picture for this second book is just really, really cute, and two cats really are better than one. Third, I was looking for a bit of a comfort read as our trip ended - and I just missed our own cats something terrible in spite of spending the first part of the trip sharing a very insistent feline and visiting a cat cafe at the end because we weren’t getting back to our own cats quickly enough.

My Review: Anyone who has ever read Before the Coffee Gets Cold will be familiar with the premise of this story. That the opportunity to go back into the past, even for just a few brief minutes, carries more possibilities than the obvious. Even if the obvious seems to be what Aeon Expeditions is providing in The Memory Collectors.

My Review: I picked this up, and started it in audio, because I adored the author’s two books featuring the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop) and was looking forward to more of the same. But the Morisaki Bookshop turned out to have some secret sauce that the Torunka Café, at least so far, doesn’t have.

My Review: I fell in love with this series with the very first book, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and now I’m utterly hooked on both the series AND the reading niche it occupies. By that, I mean the genre that was popularized by Before the Coffee Gets Cold of loosely connected slice-of-life stories centered around a cozy location that use that location and its function as a framing device to tell slightly bittersweet, often sadly fluffy stories with or without a hint of magic or magical realism.

My Review: There are no actual funerals in this book, only metaphorical ones. Considering the state of most of the clients of the Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee, if there actually WERE funerals, there would be a LOT of them, the recently deceased would probably have died in some gruesome way, and this would be an entirely different kind of book.

My Review: As I’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks, I’m looking for comfort reads right now. The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen looked like it would take care of that particular desire, and it certainly did. The cover looked oh-so-familiar, so I had to look back, and it IS familiar. It’s very similar to the cover of…