This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending The Moon, The Stars, and Madame Burova by the queen of uplifting fiction, Ruth Hogan.
Madame Burova—beloved Tarot reader, palmist, and clairvoyant is retiring and leaving her booth on the Brighton seafront. After inheriting her mother’s fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the pier practicing her trade. She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people’s secrets, she is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do—fulfill a promise she made in her youth, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, their whole lives ahead of them.
In London, it is time for another woman to make a fresh start. Billie has lost her university job, her marriage, and her place in the world when a sudden and unlikely discovery leaves her very identity in question. Determined to find answers, she must follow a trail—a trail that leads her straight to the Brighton pier and Madame Burova’s front door.
Spanning over the course of fifty years, and set intermittently between two timelines, now and the early 1970s, author Ruth Hogan has crafted a story that rivals (and might just surpass) the love I have for her other books. Staying true to form, she’s written an emotionally engaging story full of likeable, quirky characters, with writing that sparkles with humor and warmth. And Madame Burova is a character with a whole lot of character! It’s a perfect book to lose yourself in for a few hours.
Check out The Moon, The Stars, and Madame Burova and other uplifting works of fiction like it at the Sioux City Public Library.
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