Sara F

BookBrowse Reviewer

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BookBrowse Reviewer Sara is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

Sara (she/her) is a writer and reference librarian who lives on the east coast with her husband and two sons. She is a passionate lover of the written word and is rarely seen without at least one book in hand. When not talking loudly and at length about whatever she just read, Sara can be found cuddling her cats, baking something sinful, going down another true crime rabbit hole, looking for the door into Narnia, and spending every second she can with her family.

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (11)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Things We Never Say: A Novel
by Elizabeth Strout

(5/6/2026)

Strout has written a beautiful and devastating character study that also puts into words the psychological toll of our recent history. Though she never includes overt references to the time like mask wearing or red ball caps, the specter of COVID and the terrifying political unrest that hangs over the country permeate every part of the narrative. It is the real world where death happens abruptly, without warning or fanfare. Personal tragedies and triumphs are just that, and the earth keeps turni

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Beasts of the Sea: A Novel
by Iida Turpeinen

(1/14/2026)

In her brutal and beautiful debut novel, Iida Turpeinen perfectly blends historical fact and fiction, taking readers on a bleak trek through time to observe the devastating effect human beings have had on the world almost from the moment of their arrival. Her chosen time machine? The bones of a long-extinct sea mammal known as Stellar's Sea Cow. Its strange, sad journey becomes a metaphor for the barbaric way humanity has for generations used and abused the natural world, wiping out entire s

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Spent: A Comic Novel
by Alison Bechdel

(5/21/2025)

This is a hilarious and utterly charming graphic novel that has all the self-deprecating wit and wisdom readers have come to expect from Bechdel. With her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, she lovingly skewers the forward-thinking, socially conscious intellectuals who struggle tirelessly against "the man" but would also like to keep their Amazon deliveries and rack up their TikTok likes. It also reads as a love letter to the wonderful and wacky Dykes to Watch Out For characters she clea

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers' Rights
by Ashley Hope Pérez

(3/26/2025)

Through a variety of forms—essays, short stories, poetry, and comics—these YA authors explore the issues around book bans and censorship (young adult fiction is the most frequently banned genre in public schools and libraries)... Banned Together is an excellent, incredible resource that entertains and teaches in equal measure. It is full of unique authorial voices that represent many different cultures and life experiences. But perhaps its greatest gift is the wonderful introd

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Three Lives of Cate Kay: A Novel
by Kate Fagan

(2/12/2025)

Kate Fagan's stirring novel takes the form of a tell-all memoir that Cate writes to come clean about who she is. The largest focus is on the three different women who each knew and loved a different version of Cate... In this way, The Three Lives of Cate Kay is a love story, one in which Cate must find the strength to correct her mistakes and return to the people she left behind in order to accept that love, to feel that she deserves it, and to live honestly as herself.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage: A Novel
by Asia Mackay

(1/15/2025)

Despite the couple's macabre extracurricular activities, readers will be hard-pressed not to empathize with vigilante serial killers Fox and Hazel as they navigate marriage, parenthood, and their murderous impulses. Their struggle to balance giving their daughter the loving life they never had with a burning need to work out their issues through the torture and killing of rapists, wife beaters, and child abusers makes for genuinely hilarious, if occasionally dark, reading... Sparkling, witty dia

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Sorceress Comes to Call
by T. Kingfisher

(8/21/2024)

A large part of Kingfisher's appeal is her ability to eschew the obvious choices when she adapts existing source material. Where other authors might lean into unlikely romantic entanglements or simply swap the genders of main characters, she brings the barely explored magical elements of the original story to the forefront, making power and how it is wielded a major component of the narrative and transforming previously benign characters into terrifying villains. She also explores the complex re

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Wings Upon Her Back
by Samantha Mills

(6/5/2024)

This extraordinary book examines the faith of one woman at two different turning points in her life. The child Zenya renounces familiarity and family to answer the call of a god she believes in with every fiber of her being, only to learn that there is still more she must give up to prove herself. The jaded, broken warrior Zemolai, cast off after one misguided act of mercy, is faced with a reckoning that threatens to shatter her once rock-solid faith entirely. What Mills does so expertly is elic

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Song of the Six Realms
by Judy I. Lin

(5/1/2024)

The heart of Lin's story, a young outcast slowly falling in love on the estate of her mysterious stern employer, is a wonderful homage to Daphne du Maurier and the Brontë sisters. But the sorrowful, determined Xue is a breed apart from Rebecca's wilting flower narrator and even a step beyond plucky Jane Eyre. Xue's brilliant resilience shines. There is steel in this heroine's spine. She never backs away from a confrontation, even with a goddess who could smite her with a thought whil

BookBrowse Editorial Review

You Glow in the Dark
by Liliana Colanzi

(3/6/2024)

Many of the characters are trapped in their circumstances, unable to extricate themselves from isolation and poverty but increasingly desperate to do so. The lush jungles are full of bugs and diseases. Magnificent rainforests hide killer animals. Skies are described as "electric," "scandalous" rain falls, and lightning is a frequently repeated image. Places are used over and over for experimental science and dangerous technology with little regard for the people or the land. But there is often a

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Glory Be: A Glory Broussard Mystery
by Danielle Arceneaux

(1/10/2024)

Glory is a woman of contradictions, and it's those contradictions that make this such a refreshing read. Just as she begins to frustrate with her petty prejudices and cutting remarks, we are given a window into where her feelings of inadequacy and bitterness come from, and instead of getting angry, we find ourselves understanding her hurt. Arceneaux deftly reminds the reader of how her judgments were born, how someone so often brutally punched down by life and circumstances cannot help but want

Reviews (1)

Bright and Tender Dark
by Joanna Pearson

A decades old murder continues to haunt those who loved the victim and the killer (4/4/2024)

This lyrical, slow burn character study examines the haunting aftershocks of a murder that continues to resonate years after the killer has supposedly been brought to justice. The reader sees the death of one bright young woman through the eyes of strangers who are united by one terrible moment in time that changes the course of all of their lives in shocking, predictable, and tragic ways. Rather than grip the reader with thrilling moments or terrifying bad guys Pearson elects to drown us in an all too relatable grief that must surely grip anyone who survives a tragedy like this. This is a devastating, beautiful read.