Professional reviews for your published books...

Barbara Bamberger Scott has been reviewing on the internet and in print publications since 2006. She will give your book a fair, thoughtful and positive review.* Reviews can be done from print books, pdfs or other online methods. You will have a chance to read and comment on your review before it is posted on the websites at A Woman's Write and Good Reads. There is a $60.00 fee ($30 Reading + $30 Placement) payable in total ($60.00) in advance to Barbara's Paypal account butrneggss@yahoo.com. Please google Barbara Bamberger Scott to see the wide range of her reviews on such sites as Book Reporter, Curled Up with a Good Book, Blue Ink, Self Published Reviews, US Review, Foreword, Clarion, Pacific, and Chanticleer.

To secure your Review, contact Barbara directly at www.barscoinc@gmail.com">www.barscoinc@gmail.com

Please read and enjoy this sampling of Barbara's reviews:

Music, mysticism, separation, and war all play a role in this lively novel by author Ranjita Dutta Roy, whose family history has spun the threads for this beautifully woven tapestry.
Dutta Roy’s tale opens in a nightmare. A young woman, Tanushree, is being overwhelmed by the fog of gas – like that of the victims of the Holocaust, which, in her confusion and anxiety she associates with the scenes in Calcutta during the pandemonium of Partition. It is a piece of her emotional inheritance that haunts her and talking to a psychiatrist in her adopted home in Berlin only makes matters worse, as she is being seen as someone poor and ignorant, due to Indian ancestry...The author’s ability to move backward and forward in time, to show real people in the swirl of uncontrollable national and personal chaos, will touch readers who have pondered the events depicted. (Full review appears on Goodreads).

The author was born in Yugoslavia ten years after the end of World War II. Her childhood was modest, with simple farm and home experiences amid a modestly maintained family environment. She had great affection for a grandfather, some fear of an acerbic grandmother whose life had been diverted and degraded by war, and for her mother, great admiration. Though it was not commonplace for children in that era, girls especially, to fritter away their childhood by going to school, Iris was fortunate to be enrolled a small local school. By the time she reached high school, she had many friends and, though she struggled with math, her facility with languages was a boon..Novak’s writing is remarkable for its flowing articulation of difficult situations, its honesty, and its ability to bring the reader into a multitude of varying scenarios. Readers unfamiliar with her country of origin and its underlying socio-political issues will have much to learn from her memoir, and women of any age or nationality will see in her an example to be admired and imitated. (Full review appears on Amazon and Goodreads)

When a strong-minded woman tries to overcome the problems of the past, she is suddenly hit with a greater dilemma, one she can’t ignore, that may destroy the new future she had planned, in this latest offering by novelist Gail Ward Olmsted. Attorney Miranda Quinn has been blogging and garnering a wide following, resulting in a TV show offer she has accepted with enthusiasm. But just on the brink of this new endeavor, Quinn gets a call from a young woman whose actions contributed to the loss of her former position as an Assistant District Attorney. Becky dredges up her shared past with Quinn, revealing facts so eerie that they can’t be ignored. Becky, and now Miranda, hold out new hope that at last a career criminal might get what he deserves after multiple rapes and beatings of innocent women. But to help Becky present her suspicions to the legal establishment could blitz Quinn’s new job prospects. In making the right decision, the former attorney-turned-writer will be risking more than just the career challenge; there is an ex-boyfriend lurking on the sidelines ready to do anything to protect himself from Miranda’s investigations. (Full review appears on Goodreads.com)

Olmsted, wife of noted American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, is given her proper place in the limelight in this engaging historical novel by Gail Ward Olmsted. Mary and Fred face financial insecurity and eventual undeniable success wrought by the constant changes in his career prospects: the necessities of the nation’s Civil War that draw him to Washington to assist in quartering and supplying the Union troops, to California during the gold rush, to numerous American cities - Buffalo, Milwaukee, Boston - for large-scale planning projects. Through the alterations to location and activity, Mary stands firm, her strong character being built year by year. She confronts and quashes rumors of Fred’s infidelity; she is drawn to the newly burgeoning suffragette movement; and without being asked, she takes an unassuming role in managing her husband and sons’ growing businesses. By the last years of her remarkable life, Mary is a quiet phenomenon in her own right. Landscape of a Marriage is an aptly titled, beautifully constructed work that will appeal to intelligent females readers of any age, in any age. (Full review appears on Amazon.com)

Anne Cormac, young daughter of Irish immigrants, arrives in Charles Town, South Carolina, when it has a population of only a few thousand. Anne is already a daring soul who soon learns to shoot a gun, ride horseback and use a knife, but shows scant interest in women’s work. When her mother dies not long after they have settled in, Anne’s wild streak only deepens, so that when a gruff stranger attacks her in the forest, he has his way but she has hers, cutting his throat so that he “would never hurt another girl.” This longing for independence finally causes her to run away to sea, following a friend, James Bonny; but to gain admittance to the ship, she must marry him. Later she and her chosen lover Calico Jack will be joined byanotherlegendary female pirate, Mary Read. Author Holmes was drawn to the story of the two famed female pirates as part of her exploration of feminism. She once took a turn on a tall ship, allowing her to experience working the ropes and climbing aloft as those valiant women did. Her background in broadcast journalism and screenplay writing doubtless contributed to the research skills needed to piece together the somewhat sketchy historical annals regarding the early colonial period in which these feisty females came of age, and the Caribbean islands and American coastal lands where they sailed, schemed and did battle. (Full review at Goodreads)

A young woman discovers her true essence, and how best to present it, in Linda Sheehan’s emotive tale of love, loss, will and wine. Samantha Goodyear quits her steady, frustrating but much needed employment as an accountant in a growing New York firm, given a chance to realize her true dream. She’s a self-described wine geek - drinker, taster, judge, and hopefully someday, creator of the beverage. She has an offer from wealthy friends of friends to spend some time in France, not as a formal guest, though that is on offer, but as a toiler in their vineyard, where she can learn the winemaking trade from the ground up. While there she is courted by Julien, the handsome, exceedingly charming son of the owners. She returns to the US in a fog of mixed feelings: missing Julien, floored by some dark revelations about his family and wacky ones about her parents, all blending with fresh, wine-inspired motivation. She takes a job as bookkeeper at a vineyard in Napa. There she will learn more about the commercial aspects of the wine world, and find, by dint of her adventurous spirit, a disused vineyard capable of producing some of the best grapes in the world. (Full review at Goodreads)

Telling her story from the voices and viewpoints of four of its characters, debut author Vermaas paints a vivid picture of how she and her entrepreneur husband Garry, two of the voices, combined their career goals with a sense of higher purpose. Both were graduates of Columbia University who started their married life in comfort in the US. An economic downturn stymied Garry’s ambitions, so with a business strategy he had been carefully devising, he moved JD, son Garret, daughter Jolyn, and baby Shi Ya, adopted in China - to Qatar, where he would design an Emir’s palace. Garret, the third of the book’s story carriers, was burdened by autism. Fortunately, he came to enjoy being part of pack of adopted siblings that would eventually number 12, including himself and Jolyn. Angela, the book’s fourth voice, is a third world orphan whose sorrows, terrors and survival instinct provide a counterpoint to the safety and comfort generated and shared among the Vermaas family circle. Finding and taking to heart each new child required international travel – to China, India, and the Philippines - up to the last titanic effort – six siblings at once. (Full review at Amazon, Bookbub, Goodreads)

“Winning is everything.” That’s the prevailing philosophy in the kart racing world, the racing world in general, and forms the basis for an emotional, action-packed look at what can happen to young people when they become addicted to speed, competition and the need to succeed. Gary Lee Dillanger’s dad was all for his participating in racing, starting him off at age eight with a kart once raced by a kid from the storied Kilgore family. The Kilgore men – Monroe, Sonny and now young Mackie – are racing icons. They drive as fast as they like with impunity almost everywhere, but especially around their Alabama home where they are revered. Gary Lee, now about to graduate from high school, has ambitions to become Kilgore’s new star, until a dark night on a back road, where a car gets the best of him. He winds up in the ER, comatose, not knowing if he is responsible for the crash that threatens his life and has killed his girlfriend Gillian. Debut author Jaseron has carefully constructed this complex look at the racing scene and how it affects, and may destroy, lives while tainting the morality of those who manage to ascend to the top echelons. (Full review at Amazon.com)

ATOP THE WINDMILL: A childhood in the American southwest is brought to life by author and linguist María Dolores Gonzales in this sparkling, bilingual memoir. The year before she was born, her parents were living on what seemed an idyllic ranch in northeastern New Mexico, but a massive flood destroyed that paradise forever, forcing a move. In 1946, Gonzales was born in what could only be described as miraculous circumstances, as her mother, laboring for days, prayed she would not die. She was named for her grandmother, but also in honor of La Virgen who, her mother always believed, answered her prayers. Such remarkable, sometimes uplifting, sometimes fraught incidents, are sprinkled throughout the narrative: mother and children being serenaded by Mariachis the day they departed after spending time with their father who had taken a job in Mexico; their father’s perilous walk home through a horrific blizzard; María’s mother “learning” to drive when she and her daughters were stranded on the highway; her mother’s sudden offer of a teaching job when the family was on the brink of financial collapse. (Full review at Goodreads)

In this highly personal retrospective, author Marilee Eaves recreates a childhood of privilege and the gradual development of wisdom and the wish to give back. Eaves’ book opens at a critical juncture. Consigned to a locked hospital ward after a psychotic breakdown in her early college years, she receives a phone call from her mother insisting that she return home to New Orleans to be the Queen of the Krewe of Osiris Ball during the coming year’s debutante celebrations. Like her mother and grandmother, Eaves was expected to relish this honor, which denoted her as “royal” in NOLA’s lofty social circles. With trepidation she agrees, thus subsuming her own wishes, fears and ambitions to take her role in family tradition. Eaves describes her upbringing surrounded by luxuries but unsettled by a neglectful mother, an overbearing stepfather, a weight problem, and a slowly growing urge to escape. The life to which she was heiress would have seemed to some like a paradise of gala events, servants, prestige and even an overseas cruise. But it also included almost constant psychiatric therapies in adulthood, confusion, infidelities and more than one mental collapse. (Full review at Amazon.com)