Books like Welcome to the Honey B&B

I absolutely devoured this book in just a few hours. 

This Christian family drama crosses over into mystery/suspense. In a family with three sisters and one brother, no one seems to be able to get it all together. One sister is a writer, but she’s being blackmailed for what she’s writing about. The other sister is notorious for one-night stands, the third sister is mostly stable with a husband and two kids.

Their brother? He’s going through a divorce. Only problem is that when he went to visit his soon-to-be ex-wife, he found her dead. With a shared son and a dying mother-in-law, who should have custody over the child? It seemed simple until the brother was listed as a person of interest for his wife’s death. The sisters all put on their detective hats to help their brother out.

I laughed at the sibling rivalry in this book and… show more.

I love a good family drama where there’s a found family.

A young reporter is assigned to write the obituary of an alive woman, Mrs. Kip. Mrs. Kip lost her husband, never remarried, and never had children. But she lived what could appear to be a thousand lives as she held different roles and careers throughout her life.

In order for one job/role/calling to end, a part of her had to die. Now, faced with a young blonde who favors her, Mrs. Kip feels as though maybe this is the daughter she never had, the daughter who would listen to the stories, the daughter that might not be family by blood, but family by heart.

This story gave me a lot of “spread the Gospel” vibes, but also reminded me to not sleep on the seniors in our lives. They have a lot to offer, too. 

This book made me feel like I was eating Southern biscuits and gravy, but there weren’t seconds! I wanted more!

A death changes the world of this entire family, but told through the lens of four sisters, we see how complicated all families can really be.

One sister struggles with her marriage, another struggles with being single, the youngest, unsure of her next career move, and another has secrets too painful to share. With a grudge-holding brother and mom who are also grieving, the family must look to God for healing and redemption.

I felt the love and warmth on every page, and couldn’t stop reading it. Finding faith and love is the crux of this entire Christian family drama novel, and you won’t finish it with dry eyes. I sure didn’t!

Reading Christy Miller Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4 practically summarizes a good portion of my teenage life.

Well, that and me trying desperately to recreate the amazing scenes you don’t want to miss within these pages. Only told from the POV of fifteen-year-old Christy Miller, we meet a girl whose life has been upended by a sudden move to California, a wealthy but rude aunt, and a hot surfer on the beach.

Problem? He’s a die-hard Christian who plays guitar at church. She’s never accepted Christ and doesn’t know the first thing about beach living. In fact, she only has the world’s ugliest one-piece green bathing suit.

Christy Miller is the forever friend that I wish I could meet in real life!

The protagonist in this book is ConaLee, a 12-year-old girl mature beyond her years whose father, a Union soldier, is severely injured in the Civil War and doesn’t remember who he is (he never makes it back home). Her mother is raped by a roaming Confederate war veteran and traumatized to the point of muteness.

The Confederate soldier drops the mother and ConaLee off at a lunatic asylum in West Virginia, where a mysterious night watchman joins what becomes a compelling tale. I enjoyed this book because it introduces a spirited preteen protagonist who is trying to keep her family together and shows how devastating the Civil War was to so many families.  

Again, fiction that is based on facts–but in this novel, the facts take over and engulf the reader in an apocalyptic tornado.

The book has an obsessive quality. Most of it deals with the life of the legendary mathematician John von Neumann, known as the “father of the computer,” who switched from pure mathematics to nuclear destruction, artificial life, and various other games.

Labatut’s admirably well-researched saga explores the inhuman face of science and the demonic aspects of progress “for which there is no cure” (copyright John von Neumann). A technological maelstrom to give Edgar Allan Poe the creeps, the book shows that romantic science has come a long way since Dr. Frankenstein. 

I was completely absorbed by Beautiful Ugly, where nothing is quite what it seems.

I love stories that play with perception, and this one does it so elegantly, weaving grief and obsession into something hauntingly beautiful. The isolated Scottish island provides a fabulously claustrophobic and creepy backdrop that I couldn’t get enough of.

It’s dark, atmospheric, and exquisitely written—I raced through it.

I loved how the author took multiple “minor characters” in the Bible and connected their stories, causing me to take a closer look at these lesser-known individuals.

In this book, Angela Hunt identifies the Lydia mentioned in Acts 16 as the same person called Euodia in Philippians 4 and presents a compelling argument as to why in her Author’s Note. The slave girl Paul liberates from a demon in Acts 16 is also given a prominent role as Euodia attempts to rescue her from a cruel master who seeks to restore her “gift.”

I enjoyed the quick pace and ever-changing setting as Euodia travels throughout Macedonia. Rich cultural details coupled with a marriage of convenience that blossoms into more made this a satisfying adventure!

I knew little about North Woods when I started reading it, except that it chronicled the lives of different inhabitants of a farmhouse in western New England—a region I love—and featured an intriguing image of what I assumed was a bobcat on the cover.

North Woods brings its setting vividly to life; while there are fascinating characters—including a colonial-era English soldier who abandons the war to cultivate an apple orchard on the farmhouse property—the flora and fauna of the farm and its surrounding woodlands play equally important roles.

I’m grateful to my daughter, the same sensitive reader who cried when she finished Homegoing, for posting a photo of her copy of North Woods along with her lunch one day and piquing my curiosity.

A French import published in the US in 2024, Plasmas is an intriguingly spare, linked collection of short futuristic scenes.

Acrobats whose routines are programmed by biotechnology…tomorrow’s La Brea Tar Pits, where artifacts of both the distant past—and future—are unearthed…a female scientist bonds idealistically and tragically with great apes…these compelling stories revolve around a post-human world, written in an icy style that often feels post-human, as well.

Prodigiously translated by Annabel Kim, it’s a subdued, sort-of successor to Cosmicomics and won the French Prix de L’imaginaire, that country’s top prize for speculative fiction.