Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Chanticleer 5 Star Book Review

ODYSSEY of LOVE: A Memoir of Seeking and Finding by Linda Jämsén – Eastern European Travel, Biographies and Memoirs of Women, Travel and Adventure Biographies

Odyssey of Love: A Memoir of Seeking and Finding by Linda Jämsén is an utterly charming Eastern European take on Eat – Pray – Love.

This odyssey begins with its 40-something author exchanging her job and dead-end relationship in Boston for two years in Budapest. The goal? To explore new career opportunities, live an adventurous life as an American expat in Europe, and, possibly, hopefully, find her soulmate.

This surprising and slightly scary journey begins on a fortune-teller’s advice, and while that may seem far-fetched to some, it’s just the ticket Jämsén needs to pull herself out of her daily rut and push herself in the way of a second chance at life and love.

Can starting over be easy?

Jämsén is a bit skeptical about the soulmate search. Not that she doesn’t want to find someone, but she doesn’t think it could be that easy. Even if one considers moving halfway around the world and starting over to be a small task. The only thing she understands, both things are inevitable if one takes the first – and all the subsequent steps – in the general direction.

Finding a soulmate requires more than a bit of divine providence, if not a miracle or two. Luckily for Jämsén, the fortune-teller told her what to look for along the way.

While Odyssey of Love inevitably falls to comparisons with the “other” book and its movie, Jämsén’s journey takes several different roads to lead to her happy ending. And it’s those differences that make her trip a delight to accompany.

Odyssey of Love isn’t merely a travelogue.

It’s the story of one American woman who leaves her life behind to experience as much as she can of living and working in another country. Moreover, living and working in a country with a vastly different history from the U.S. where English is not the first or even second language spoken.

Jämsén navigates life in another culture in fits and starts, two steps forward and one step back, forming friendships that cause both cultural harmonies and cultural clashes – sometimes in the same conversations. She’s courageous and very human in her mistakes and her inevitable heartbreaks.

Then, on September 11th, 2001, the United States underwent one devastating event after another, and Jämsén’s homesickness deepened.

While it can be said the story focuses on the author’s immersion in her temporarily adopted country and her search for love, the story has a spiritual aspect to it, as well. But the spiritualism of Odyssey of Love has a solid Western orientation, rather than the Eastern journeys of that other book. Linda searches for places and icons representing Mary’s journey from the Christmas nativity scene to her death in either Ephesus or Jerusalem.

Odyssey of Love shines a light on a fascinating and very personal journey of one woman’s pursuit of her dreams to find the place and the person where she belongs. Her discoveries along the way, both the world she surrounds herself in and the internal musings of her own mind and heart, take readers right along with her.

Readers who fell for the author’s journey of exploration in Eat – Pray – Love will be over the moon and halfway to the stars to follow along on Linda Jämsén’s Odyssey of Love.

May 20, 2021
Beyond Balancing the Books: Sheer Mindfulness for Professionals in Work and Life by George Marino, CPA/CFP – Mindfulness, Healthy Lifestyles, Positive Transformation

George Marino, a practicing CPA and Mindfulness Coach, explores the possibilities for sustainable positivity in one’s work-life through mindfulness principles and practices in his new book, Beyond Balancing the Books: Sheer Mindfulness for Professionals in Work and Life.

It would be difficult to find a profession more fraught with detail, deadlines, and distress than a typical CPA. Applying to that particular realm the idea of mindful meditation is a challenge that author Marino has taken on because it is a process he has lived. He opens his book by comparing two CPAs and their approaches to life and work-life.

Larry wakes up early, already stressed by the problems facing him at the office. Whenever he’s alone, he reaches for the nearest device to fill the silence; he is a Type A personality, driven and competitive. However, work increases his inner anxieties, fears, and self-doubts. Amy, by contrast, wakes at her usual time, feeling rested, starting the day with a positive mantra, enjoying breakfast with her family, and looking forward to the possibilities of helping others through her work skills, focusing on the client’s needs and feelings. Through these examples and many others, Marino illustrates basic tenets and techniques of mindfulness, a practice that, among other benefits, can reduce physical symptoms of stress.

Marino has designed his mindfulness-based template around the phrase “beyond balancing the books,” or the three B’s.

“Beyond” signifies the stillness and peacefulness that result from reining in the thought process by simply becoming aware of one’s surroundings. “Balancing” refers to the blending of “human” and “being,” that is, of one’s typical human physical state and the possibilities of a mental or spiritual realm that exists and can intermingle with, and enhance, one’s physical existence. “The books” represents our “accounting for what really counts” – finding higher purpose. Simple exercises, such as three minutes of deep breathing, provide a start in the right direction. Marino expands the practices to help readers examine their true feelings about troublesome situations. Doing so helps his clients to accept and allow their feelings to meld into larger, positive goals.

Marino has a second career as a life coach, where he counsels those in his own profession and those outside of the accounting world. At One Heart Coaching, LLC, he employs images of the accountant’s crucially essential work tasks of preparing taxes and assisting in business management. His book is filled with a wide variety of wisdom, from the classical – Sufi poet Hafiz, Shakespeare, modern writer Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now). Discovering and practicing mindfulness changed Marino’s life, and he desires to help as many individuals as possible.

Readers will benefit from the many supplemental resources such as a “Mindfulness at Work Questionnaire for Professionals” and a reading list for further study. Marino’s guidebook is a rich mine of helpful advice for anyone seeking a calmer, more spiritually focused approach to life’s dilemmas. Highly Recommended!

May 18, 2021
The SOMEWHERE I SEE YOU AGAIN by Nancy Thorne – Coming of Age YA, Vietnam War Era, Friendship/Adventure
Nancy Thorne weaves a brilliant story that encompasses all of the outrageous and contradictory emotions of two young women in her YA novel, The Somewhere I See You Again.

Set in eastern Canada, Thorne takes us back to the early 1970s when the Vietnam War was headlining the news. Hannah has her own war, though, and she has given it a name, Luke. It stands for leukemia, which has changed her life and colors her world as her mom battles cancer.

Hannah lives on Sloan Hill, the wrong side of town, where her family struggles to survive. Her mother’s battle with Luke leaves her weak and bedridden. Hannah must find a job to help out and pick up some of the lost income. To make matters worse, Hannah’s high school is being torn down, which means she and her best friend Stacy will attend Carver High and hobnob with the Burgess aristocracy. Hannah rides on Stacy’s social coattails as her friend’s quiet beauty opens doors and gains them entrance into the homes of the wealthy.

One of the many goals on Hannah’s list is to get inside her dream house, a mansion where her father works as the groundskeeper. Hannah learns that Christopher Holding lives in her dream house and thus begins her mission to set Stacy up with Chris and get invited to his big party. Once inside, she takes photos to share with her father but unwittingly captures images of Chris dealing drugs. Oops.

Stacy has her own set of problems.

It’s only been a year since her father’s death, but her mother decides to become involved with a real creep – Mr. Callaghan, whose interests seem to expand beyond the attentions of Stacy’s mother and onto Stacy. When Mr. Callaghan becomes her mom’s fiancé, Hannah and Stacy know she’s marrying him for the security he brings, not for love. Stacy goes along with Hannah’s plan and becomes Chris’s girlfriend, even though she’s in love with Danny, a short-order cook who dreams of being a chef. She keeps Danny a secret because she knows Hannah would never approve.

When Stacy needs money to help her mom, Hannah devises a plan to blackmail Chris for his drug money with the photos she took at his party. Because his dad is on the fast track to being a judge, pictures of his son dealing drugs would destroy his chances. The photos, it turns out, become leverage. The day the two girls decide to approach Chris, he is already gone. His father accepted a job across the continent in Vancouver, BC.

Nancy Thorne delivers her characters in high-resolution.

Thorne develops a real schemer in Hannah, who goes into overdrive. Mr. Callaghan finds them both jobs in a swank hotel in Jasper and even gives them train fare. Instead, they hitchhike across Canada straight to Vancouver. Along the way, they meet a young American trying to avoid the draft. Things go from crazy to insane as Hannah and Stacy maneuver the travails of hitching cross-country to blackmail Chris. They survive a bear attack, forest fires, and scorching disappointments that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, all to the backdrop of music from the time. Hannah learns who her real friends are, and she comes to understand something more about the complicated world in which she lives.

Nancy Thorne’s The Somewhere I See You Again will have readers laughing and crying and rooting for Hannah and Stacy as they brave the open roads of Canada during the Vietnam crisis era, searching for salvation and a better life. What they find, however, is so much more fulfilling. Highly recommended.
May 17, 2021
KOBEE MANATEE® – Climate Change and the Great Blue Hole Hazard by Robert Scott Thayer – Children’s Environmental Books, Children’s Marine Life Books

Author Robert Scott Thayer and illustrator Lauren Gallegos bring to life another beautifully told tale in the fourth book in the series, Kobee Manatee® – Climate Change and the Great Blue Hole Hazard.

In the engaging and increasingly popular Kobee Manatee® children’s book series, the lovable sea cow and friends are off to help Cousin Quinn clean up the plastic that’s littering the ocean area around her new underwater eating establishment. The 500-mile journey across the water turns into an enlightening adventure, as these characters face unexpected challenges and dilemmas, many brought on by the harmful effects of climate change and ocean pollution.

Kobee Manatee® is always ready to lend a hand – and make a new friend.

Fresh from their latest adventure in the Cayman Islands, Kobee, along with Pablo, the hermit crab, and Tess the seahorse, swim to Belize, where they find the home of the Great Blue Hole. En route, Pablo rescues a spotted turtle ensnared in plastic, so the long-lashed loggerhead, Tameeka, happily joins the trio. Venturing on, these friends circumvent dangers, from the whip-like tentacles of a man-of-war to the poisonous intentions of a scorpionfish.

But these are not the only dangers the friends face.

The friends’ excitement upon reaching the expansive Great Blue Hole phenomenon quickly fades as Pablo tumbles into its dark depths. Luckily Tameeka’s deep-diving skills help save the day. After everyone pitches in with the ocean clean-up, they enjoy a fun gathering at the café, including an offering of seagrass subs and Kobee’s guitar accompaniment.

Conversations between Kobee Manatee® and his cohorts are lively and animated, with an ever-present focus on the beauty, dangers, and casualties witnessed within the ocean environment. As a clever educational component, the book is accented throughout with small images of Kobee Manatee® ancient treasure map-type scrolls that reveal informative, fun facts relevant to the narrative. These range from the knowledge that nearly 8 million metric tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean every year and insight that warming climates cause sea coral to fade to a list of conservation organizations fighting the destruction of our oceans and coastlines.

Lauren Gallegos’ illustrations further bring the pages to life and provide a wonderful complement to the story.

The backdrop of a pale blue ocean world lends a perfect contrast to the vibrant colors of the central characters and surrounding marine life. Whether a plump, gray Kobee sporting a fluorescent yellow jacket and purple cap, a seahorse with a violet body and raspberry bouffant mane, or an orange-shelled crustacean with his green bug-eyes, the vivid hues and expressive details are sure to attract a young reader’s attention. Shades of mauve and purple, turquoise, green, and tangerine highlight visuals of kelp, coral, sea fans, and fish life, while the dark saturation of royal blue emphasizes the far-reaching depths of the ocean’s monstrous Great Blue Hole.

For young readers who enjoy imaginative tales surrounding affable and heroic sea creatures, as well as parents and/or teachers looking for a way to introduce youngsters to the importance of marine conservation, Kobee Manatee® Climate Change and The Great Blue Hole Hazard offers a perfect blend. Highly recommended!

May 4, 2021
CRUDE INTENT: An Alex Sheridan Thriller by Elizabeth Jeffett – Romantic Thriller, Thriller and Suspense, Mystery Thriller

Elizabeth Jeffett delivers a hot, steamy second book in the Alex Sheridan Thrillers, Crude Intent.

Alex Sheridan, the androgynously-named heroine of Crude Intent, just about has it all: a gorgeous body and face, millions of dollars, and a business acumen enabling her to match wits and wiles in the male-dominated oil wildcatting business. And let’s not forget the cadre of powerful and sexy men who love her.

It would be more “all” except for the close people around her who keep getting brutally murdered. The scheming competitors and/or psychopaths who work hard at ruining her life and nearly succeeding, and the dangerous circumstances that almost end her life several times even when the intentional murderers fail.

In this second book, Alex Sheridan has survived more than her fair share of trauma.

The grisly murder of her previous business partner, Christine Welbourne, weighs on Alex. The steamy affair with oil worker Colt Forrester that began in the first novel, Silent Partners, continues. But when a fire breaks out at one of her fracking wells outside Denver, polluting the air and threatening to burn down pristine forest lands surrounding the installation, all hell breaks loose as fracking opponents launch media-friendly protests. TV coverage is everywhere, and business opponents can smell an excellent opportunity to leverage the disaster as a means of acquiring Alex’s valuable oil leases and putting her out of business.

Then comes the terrible news.

Colt Forrester is missing and might be a murder victim. With the very public knowledge of their rocky affair, Alex becomes the prime suspect in Colt’s suspected death.

This is only the beginning of Alex’s troubles in this fast-paced, romantic thriller. The sheriff and the district attorney investigating the case come after her. A giant competitor uses many operatives inside and outside the law to bring Alex down. The press, sensing a newsworthy scandal, start to portray Alex as a villain in her oil well fire disaster. Critical suspicious characters emerge at different times in the chess-like game against her.

Elizabeth Jeffett takes time to develop Alex into a believable hero.

Losing Colt and the murder of her partner Christine take their own substantial toll on her emotions as she fights against the seen and unseen forces moving against her. It is up to a loyal cadre of friends and associates, as well as a new love interest, Angus “Bull” Hawthorn, a Red Adaire-like oil well firefighter, to help keep her together in the series of disastrous revelations that threaten to destroy her. Yet Alex is no shrinking violet. As calamity after calamity engulfs her, she still finds the guts to vigorously confront the forces arrayed against her and uses her formidable personal and professional powers in the good fight to save her empire.

A subtle but interesting sidelight of the book is its well-researched focus on the fracking industry, the powerful but controversial method of extracting oil from oil shale that has helped the U.S. become a leading exporter of crude in the 21st Century. While most contemporary books portray fracking as an environmental villain, this book takes a somewhat neutral approach to the practice.

Not every strand wraps up at the end of Crude Intent. A third book is in the offing, according to an endpaper in the novel. Unlike many books designed as a series, this novel can be read from start to finish as a complete experience. Readers wanting to know what happened to certain storylines left as cliffhangers in this volume will still find satisfaction in the many unexpected twists and turns in this swift-paced engaging novel.

April 29, 2021
SACRED LIFE: Healing from the Virus in Consciousness by Bedri Cag Cetin, Ph.D. – Spiritual Self-Help, Personal Transformation, Spiritual Growth

In his biographical work, Sacred Life: Healing from the Virus in Consciousness, Bedri Cag Cetin, Ph.D. explains his version of “The Golden Key,” a phrase he uses to formulate an “Inner Guide” which seeks above all else “…peace, happiness and harmony for all involved.”

Cetin uses his advanced education, world travels, failed and then healed personal relationships, business dealings, and training under spiritual leaders to formulate his thoughts. According to Cetin, decisions based on or that cause fear, chaos, or blame reflect Ego-driven actions in one’s journey toward inner peace; whereas using one’s Inner Guide to make decisions will result in peace and harmony.

Each chapter in the book reflects a chapter in his own journey. Cetin illustrates the times in his life when he either caused chaos from Ego based actions or eventually found peace due to trusting and surrendering to his “Inner Guide.” At the end of each chapter, the author offers insights and comments that further explain his ideas. The organization of each chapter, premise, personal example, realization, acceptance of the Inner Guide, ultimately make Sacred Life easily understandable and therefore valuable.

Sacred Life falls into a loose category of “spiritual self-help” books.

Throughout the book, the author’s casual voice makes it very easy for the reader to grasp these universal and sometimes ethereal truths. Similar in tone to Tosha Silver’s Outrageous Openness, Sacred Life offers neither pretentious nor overly complicated phrasing. Rather, the path created in the book may deliver a great journey for those seeking to learn the first steps toward a more enlightened life. At the end of the book, Cetin encourages his readers to ask their Inner Guide, “What is it that I really want?”

Reminding his audience that Healing, a return to Wholeness, requires a total surrender of the illusions and barriers that obstruct the way. The Ego’s chronic addiction to “feel good” behaves much like a drug addict’s dependence on drugs. The resulting action unravels into spiritual numbness.

Cetin refers to this “numbness” as the “dark night of the soul,” but he encourages readers not to despair. Through work and attention to the Inner Guide, one can be unburdened from carrying years of accumulated baggage and find true freedom and happiness.

Universal truth points to peace and harmony.

Sacred Life: Healing from the Virus in Consciousness reflects and explains a universal truth: That peace comes from awareness, and conflict arises from dependency on the Ego. Training one’s thoughts and desires to be satisfied with peace, happiness, and harmony could ultimately end all discord and create a balanced, peaceful life.

April 24, 2021
CURSE of the CONCHOBAR – A Prequel to the Adirondack Spirit Series by David Fitz-Gerald – U.S. Historical Fiction, Family Saga Fiction, Ghost Fiction

Conchobar wakes, barely alive and in a world he does not know.

When he’s found by the tribes who call this land home, he’ll become caught by the ties of family, violence, and love, none of which he’s ready to face.

Conchobar lives in the house of Spits Teeth, the patriarch of his adoptive family. He struggles to learn their way of life, still tied by memory and longing to his home at the monastery of Skellig Michael. But he must learn to hunt, fish, and fight if he wants to survive and belong.

Despite his struggles and the language barrier itself, Conchobar begins to care for the new family around him. But an endless cycle of battle and bloodshed roars between his new tribe and their neighbors. Soon, events will rise and test his peaceful nature and put his beloved family in great peril. Beyond the threat of warclubs and arrows, a dark curse threatens to swallow all the good that he might find in this new world.

Conchobar’s life amongst the tribe of Spits Teeth is defined by his distance from them, his sense of being a fish out of water.

No matter how much he learns to live as the people around him do, he never quite understands them, always somehow on the outside looking in or yearning for his past life. He spends much of his time in his own head, musing on the world around him as he faces new and strange things. The world is interesting and alive through his eyes. The dynamic villagers show their place in the world with every word and action; as Conchobar grows close to them, they show more of who they are, what they want, and what they fear. Conchobar offers his love to his new family and his grave concern as he realizes the danger they’re in.

Fitz-Gerald takes time and great care with Conchobar, sitting with his thoughts and sorrows and joys.

His growing sense of doom becomes one with the story, as cruel twists of fate begin to unfold upon his new family. But between this dread, the people of the village open up as Conchobar learns their language, and the action of their battles and hunts together flows smoothly across the page. Their material world slowly mingles with the supernatural and mystical, spurred by Conchobar’s strange place between the two. But he doesn’t have the time to unravel his curse and his connection to the natural world, as the longer he stays in the midst of battle, the more personal it becomes to him.

The Curse of Conchobar is a tale of violence begetting violence, of the perseverance of faith and hope in the face of grief and fear. Conchobar’s dreamlike connection to nature becomes a religious experience, showing him wonders of the world, cut off by the approach of a people who never needed to be enemies.

Throughout the story, Conchobar’s voice remains strong. Fitz-Gerald breathes life into his Spits Teeth characters. In love, loss, and anger, the emotion is palpable to the reader and will remain long after the book is read. The Curse of the Conchobar – A Prequel to the Adirondack Spirit Series scratches the itch for rich character exploration, historical fiction in a time and place often underrepresented, and a love story marked by tragedy and transcendence. In other words, Fitz-Gerald delivers a worthy prequel to the Adirondack Spirit Series.

April 16, 2021
LITTLE TEA by Claire Fullerton – Southern Fiction, Friendship Fiction, Cultural Heritage Fiction

Author Claire Fullerton’s skillfully crafted fourth novel, Little Tea, weaves bits and pieces of the human condition into a timely story.

Prepare to visit Fullerton’s Deep South, where, like the tropical storms from the Gulf, the southern mystique engulfs the land and its people. Beneath the genteel manners and tradition are whirlpools of passion, unrelenting memories, and behaviors that ebb and flow to and from the edges of conscious thought, leaving behind a sense of anxious anticipation.

From when Celia Wakefield agrees to meet her high-school friends, Renny Thornton and Ava Cameron, to spend a long weekend at Renny’s lake cabin in Arkansas, she’s been uneasy. She hasn’t gone “home” for more than ten years—it’s too painful. She first met Renny and Ava before her life inexorably changed. They were thirteen years old – newly-minted adolescents eager to spread their wings and take on the world. Besties ever since, Renny and Ava are a part of Celia’s present and unthinkable history. Celia needs their friendship, but the past floats just below the surface, like a ‘gator waiting for prey.

But now she must go.

Ava, the fey sprite, the dream spinner, needs her help. She’s having a mid-life crisis and has reached out to her and Renny for support.

Celia agrees to fly to Memphis, meet Ava at the terminal, travel to Renny’s ranch in Olive Branch, Mississippi. From there, they will proceed to Renny’s lake house over the border in Arkansas for a long weekend of intervention and renewal. It’s all about Ava’s issues—not hers. It’s what good friends do.

That weekend, while Ava grapples with her discontent, alcoholism, and re-connects with her first love, Celia finds herself revisiting her own agonies. Her painful past, sublimated for so long, surfaces and demands resolution.

Little Tea resonates on many levels.

This modern-day drama juxtaposes the traumas of contemporary issues with unresolved traumas from history, where, for so many, the safe, secure, and predictable world of childhood innocence was ripped away, replaced by the unthinkable.

For the reader who not only enjoys an engaging story but values skilled writing, Little Tea fits the bill. Fullerton’s use of lyrical language, imagery, and authentic dialogue capture the feel of the south. Her characters are believable—everyone knows an “Ava.” Fullerton uses setting as a nuanced character, always nearby, influencing without being intrusive and, her pacing and word choices are exemplary.

Like many modern, provocative novels, Little Tea ends not by tidying up anything. Fullerton leaves her readers with an open door, so to speak, that allows readers to venture out onto the porch, sit down on the old wicker rocker, and ponder what the characters might do next. In this trusting the reader, Fullerton gifts us with latitude for interpretation.

If you’ve never spent time in the south or wish to revisit, Little Tea will take you there. All in all, Fullerton has given readers a story that engages both the mind and the heart. Little Tea won First in Category in the 2019 Somerset Awards for literary fiction.

April 5, 2021
FORTUNE’S CHILD: A Novel of Empress Theodora by James Conroyd Martin – Ancient History Fiction, Middle Eastern Literature, Biographical Fiction

James Conroyd Martin brings to life one woman we should all know better in his multi-award-winning, epic novel, Fortune’s Child: A Novel of Empress Theodora.

Like Cleopatra, Empress Theodora was a legend in her own time. And also, like Queen Cleopatra before her, Empress Theodora’s life and accomplishments were distorted and maligned by the male historians of her own time. Even after death, men who couldn’t bear or couldn’t believe that a woman, particularly a woman of the lower classes as Theodora was, could possibly have accomplished the things she did or wield the power she had.

Fortune’s Child, the first book of a projected duology, Theodora, near death, determines to leave behind an accurate chronicle of her life and work. She’s desperate to get a step ahead of the official biography already being written by a man who hates her, everything she came from, and everything she stands for.

What’s an empress to do?

As Claudius does in Robert Graves’ landmark I, Claudius, Theodora intends to tell her own story before it is too late. A terrible cancer that will eventually claim her life significantly weakens Theodora. She lacks the strength to write the biography herself. So she commissions an old friend, the scribe, historian, and palace eunuch Stephen, to write it for her.

After all, he was there for a great deal of it. So much of it, in fact, that Theodora placed him into prison to keep him quiet about it all and has now released him to have him set the record straight.

An empress in the making.

As Theodora tells Stephen details of her past, both before they met and after, the reader experiences her hardscrabble childhood. One comes to understand that before all else, Theodora was a survivor.

Everything she did, every decision made, every hard path she took, points to a woman who wanted to survive. In the truest form of survival, Theodora wanted to make a better life for herself, and if possible, for the women who came after her.

James Conroyd Martin masterfully brings the 6th century Eastern Empire to life. From Africa to the Levant to the glittering gem of Constantinople, the reader sees the sprawling successor to the Roman Empire through the eyes of a woman whose story began at the bottom as an actress and a prostitute. Despite the humble background, the Empress determines to rise to the top by any – and every – means available to her.

Empress Theodora’s story will resonate with modern readers.

The determination to make a far better life for herself, based on her own gifts and on her own, Theodora’s proto-feminism makes her an easy character for contemporary readers to identify with as she rises to dizzying heights and unprecedented power. As she discovers loyal friends and makes desperate enemies on all sides.

The facts and figures of Martin’s masterpiece are not hidden. They are for all to uncover. Theodora’s life and accomplishments are not nearly well enough known. The adventure, the danger, the drama, and the glitter swallow readers whole into this recreation of a world that is long gone and an empress who should be better remembered.

Fortune’s Child is a brilliant historical biography rendered in full color, vibrantly animated by its author, James Conroyd Martin. Theodora’s life story is so significant, in fact, that it will take more than one volume to tell all there is to tell. And that is simply glorious.

James Conroyd Martin won the Overall Grand Prize in the 2019 CIBA Awards, the Best Book of the Year, for Fortune’s Child: A Novel of Empress Theodora.

April 2, 2021
The JOY of SEARCHING, BUYING and SELLING ANTIQUES and HOME DECOR from FRANCE and ENGLAND by Dennis J. Kotchmar – Traveler and Explorer Biographies, Europe Travel Guide, Antiques and Collectibles

If ever a love letter could be written in the context of a solid how-to guide in the antique business, Dennis Kotchmar has done a marvelous job in The Joy of Searching, Buying and Selling Antiques and Home Décor from France and England.

Dennis recalls his beloved wife Laura and the remarkable life they shared as they traveled the world locating, buying, selling, and displaying household treasures from candles to couches to credenzas.

Dennis met Laura (now passed away) in 1971 when he was in the military, and she was an assistant elementary school principal in the Virginia Beach school system in Virginia. They shared a love for sporty cars and soon, for each other. Laura had already begun to demonstrate a zeal for collecting and selling interesting objects. With Dennis at her side, she grew this interest into a full-scale business, Chelsea Antiques. It began close to home, going to local auction sales seeking items of unusual interest. With no business experience, they took advantage of the development of Brightleaf Square, a former tobacco warehouse district converted into a charming marketplace in downtown Durham. The Kotchmars secured a space there and began building inventory.

Laura had an eye for décor and arrangement, and before long became a display artist with a fine instinct for desirable products that seemed to come naturally to her.

Her enthusiasm soon led the couple farther afield; noting that antiques and art objects from the English countryside were enjoying popularity, they made reliable contacts there and traveled to and from London where they resided at the time several times a year. From there, they began to buy and sell, remotely at first and then by on-site visits, in France. The work was a continually growing success and, as Kotchmar notes, a continual surprise. Travel could be a joy – or a problem. Laura was once stuck on a plane whose engines were attacked by a flock of birds; there were unavoidable delays for such things as airline strikes; and perhaps most memorable, ten days spent trapped in France and England, just after 9-11.

Kotchmar’s vivid color photos grace the narrative, with a stand-out being views of Monet’s garden including the famous lily pond; he and Laura were touched and amazed that ordinary folk can still visit such storied sites. His book also contains nitty-gritty details of the business, including the contacts made and lost, back roads explored, and the truly spectacular range of items to be discovered, marketed, and enhanced.

Kotchmar composed this memoir as a paean to Laura.

In doing so, he has come to appreciate her intelligence and intuition all the more. He concludes that Laura did what she loved, and working together, they created an aura of romance and adventure that few couples can even dream of. His book will be of interest to fans of antiques and the antique business, as well as to North Carolinians, who will admire the ambition and artistry of Laura Kotchmar, one of their own.

March 31, 2021