A Potpourri of Opinions

  The Courtesan's Daughter Susanne Dunlap Publication date: April 25, 2023 by Atmosphere Press Genre: Historical Fiction Rating: 3 🍷🍷🍷 Summary: What happens when a daughter’s dream and a mother’s sordid past collide? 1910 New York. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie and her French-immigrant mother Justine eke out a living doing piecework in a tenement on the Lower East Side, while Sylvie attends school so that she can escape their life of poverty by becoming a teacher. At least, that’s what her mother believes should happen. Sylvie, though, has a different dream. She wants to be a star in the new moving pictures, just like the beautiful Vitagraph Girl. When she meets a dangerously handsome Italian boy at church one Sunday and he encourages her ambitions, she begins secretly taking steps toward the career she knows her mother won’t approve of. But Sylvie isn’t the only one with secrets. Justine has kept her sordid past from Sylvie ever since they came to New York fifteen years before, sti...

The Portraitist: A Novel of Adelaide Labille-Guiard Susanne Dunlap Publication Date: August 30, 2022 by She Writes Press Genre: Historical Fiction Rating: 5 🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷  Summary:  Based on a true story, this is the tale of Adélaïe Labille-Guiard's fight to take her rightful place in the competitive art world of eighteenth-century Paris. With a beautiful rival who's better connected and better trained than she is, Adélaïde faces an uphill battle. Her love affair with her young instructor in oil painting gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves. Meanwhile, her rival goes from strength to strength, becoming Marie Antoinette's official portraitist and gaining entrance to the elite Académie Royale at the same time as Adélaïde. When at last Adélaïde earns her own royal appointment and receives a massive commission from a member of the royal family, ...

With a new blog one must take the time to introduce themselves. 😀 I've worked in museums and libraries since 2012 and have been a librarian/branch manager at several different public libraries since 2018. As a librarian I feel I am partly expected to have some kind of literary influencer presence outside of work.   During the pandemic a group of random women banded together and created the blog With A Book In Our Hands. Someone sponsored the domain name and we flooded social media on a weekly basis. We covered all genres and it was pretty remarkable. Sadly, as time went by, the enthusiasm for the blog waned and we lost several of our founding members. That, coupled with an exorbitant amount of technical issues, inclined me to think about taking the lead on my own blog.  I am fortunate that in my position I have been able to host virtual author chats with some AMAZING authors. Debut authors, USA Today bestselling authors, New York Times bestselling authors, and internatio...