Kimmery Martin is a doctor, mother, and professional book nerd, who is happiest lounging on a porch with something good to read. When not practicing medicine or romping with her three kids, she writes engaging book reviews and novels.
Stay tuned...
The Queen of Hearts
by Kimmery Martin
Coming February 6, 2018 from Penguin Random House: The Queen of Hearts is a riveting and witty novel about friendship, love and betrayal set against a backdrop of hospital rounds and life-or-death decisions
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The Last Kids on Earth is about a 13 year old boy named Jack Sullivan, whose town and possibly the rest of the world has had a monster apocalypse. This is very bad.
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Guest Review: Young Adult Fiction
It occurred to me awhile back that I don't have much YA fiction reviewed here. I actually love YA-- Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games), Rick Riordan (the Percy Jackson series), and of course the incomparable John Green (The Fault In Our Stars.) But I tend to only read the bestsellers and the big names, so I decided to enlist a bona fide young adult to help me out here. So: meet Elle Boyle.
Elle is a high school junior in Charlotte, North Carolina. When she is not throwing discus and shotput for her high school track team, she enjoys reading a wide variety of books that sweep her off her feet. As you'll soon see , she is both brainy and beautiful. Click HERE to read her latest review, of Adam Silvera's History Is All You Left Me.
Jessica Strawser: Almost Missed You
Almost Missed You begins with an event so startling there is no possible chance you’ll put the book down. A woman named Violet is vacationing with her husband Finn and her little son Bear, luxuriating in the bright beauty of the Florida sun and sand, her mind drifting in lazy, grateful reminiscence. In one of those fantastic meet-cute situations, she and Finn had first encountered each other on a trip to this very beach—thrown together during an emergency in which there’d been no chance to exchange information. In a show of inexplicable cosmic irony, ... MORE
Latest Book Reviews
We Could Be Beautiful: Swan Huntley
It’s very difficult to write a book with an unlikable main character. Or, I should say, it’s very difficult to write a book with an unlikable main character that people will actually like. Happily, Swan Huntley pulls it off with We Could Be Beautiful.
WCBB is about a shallow Manhattan heiress, Catherine West, who views herself as a bit of a poor-little-rich-girl, suffering from a lack of fulfillment despite her massive wealth. Part of it is simple boredom. She owns an artsy-fartsy stationery boutique in the Village, but she rarely bothers to work there, instead preferring random drop-ins to critique the performance of her two employees. She maintains a lavish schedule of massages, exercise, and shopping, all fueled by regular trust-fund infusions, but none of those things manage to obscure the yawning hole in Catherine’s life. ... MORE
Chevy Stevens: Never Let You Go
I read Stevens' debut novel Still Missing when it was released in 2010 and remember it as one of the creepiest abduction scenes ever (let's just say I decided not to be a real-estate agent after reading it.) Her latest thriller, Never Let You Go, comes out today and I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy.
When it comes to selecting men, Lindsey Nash has issues. Her husband, Andrew, is a stellar representative of the male gender, except for his frightening control-freak tendencies, and a bone-deep meanness that occasionally lapses into psychotic rage. Needless to say ... MORE
Let’s open with this: a politician, the faux-folksy governor of Wyoming—who harbors presidential aspirations, despite a blatant disregard for the U.S. Constitution—is attacked in a park in Chicago. Various news outlets, in their haste to break the story, do not bother to ascertain any details before issuing a slew of hysterical, speculative headlines. To the utter delight of the media, it gradually emerges that the governor was hit by “projectiles” (i.e. a handful of pebbles) tossed by a teaching assistant with the vaguely insane-sounding name of Faye Andresen-Anderson. As an added bonus, apparently Faye’s past includes a stint as a war protestor and—wait for it—an arrest for prostitution.
This is just too much. How can one headline possibly gather all these amazing details? RADICAL HIPPIE PROSTITUTE TEACHER BLINDS GOV. PACKER IN VICIOUS ATTACK!
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What I'm Reading Now
May 2017:
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena; Eden by Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg; Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin
April 2017:
The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional by Agustin Fuentes;
Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave; We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen; The Wonder by Emma Donoghue; The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
March 2017:
Natchez Burning by Greg Iles; All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai; The Wife by Meg Wolitzer; The Ax by Donald Westlake; The Widow by Fiona Barton; Casualties by Elizabeth Marro; They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery
*Support readers! Books purchased through links return 4-10% to this website, all of which is donated to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation.
About Kimmery
Kimmery Martin won her first short story contest in the first grade, and was awarded a red stuffed elephant and publication in the school newspaper. Her writing career then suffered an unfortunate dry spell, finally broken with the publication of the enthralling journal article Lymphatic Mapping and Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy in the Staging of Melanoma, followed by the equally riveting sequel Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy for Pelvic Malignancies, both during medical school.
Conscious readers remained elusive, however, prompting her to wait another decade or so before trying again. This time, spurred on by a dubious but loving husband and three constantly interfering children, she produced an entire novel. Trauma Queen, exploring the startling secrets in a friendship between a trauma surgeon and a pediatrician, became an instantly beloved classic amongst three of her friends. It will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018.
When not working on her next novel ... MORE
