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Pamela Kramer

Biography

Pamela Kramer


Pamela Kramer began her obsession with books by reading the entire Wizard of Oz series when she was in kindergarten and first grade. She was a lawyer for many years and is retired from her job as a dual language gifted teacher in Highland Park, Illinois. Pamela enjoyed combining her love of books and her love of animals with her teaching. She got to read new picture books to younger students and used their reactions in her reviews. Through her website, she is able to recommend middle grade and young adult books to students. All the students and former students (and teachers) know where to go for good book recommendations! She served on the Illinois Bluestem steering committee (Illinois School Library Media Association Award) for several years.

Pam also loves to read adult books, and several authors whose books she has reviewed have become friends. She has rescued a variety of animals, from dogs and cats to rats and rabbits, and she loves nothing more than reading while cuddling with one of her four dogs or two cats. She always has a foster dog in her home as well. She has reviewed books online since 2010 and began writing about books for the now defunct Examiner.com website and later as a contributor to Huffington Post. She continues to review -- mostly on her blog, PamelaKramer.com. She spends school breaks reading as much as possible while also organizing and checking the massive piles of books in her home. Her favorite thing? Seeing a quote from one of her reviews on the back of a book!

Pamela Kramer

Reviews by Pamela Kramer

by Sara Goodman Confino - Comedy, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor, Romance, Women's Fiction

1962. An aspiring reporter in DC, Judy Greenberg is aiming for journalistic greatness --- not finding a husband. Just don’t tell her mother. Then one day, she answers her boss’s private line. The message is curiously cryptic. It’s also delivered in a Russian accent. Judy is certain she has stumbled upon a scoop. Charming reporter Jack Fields isn’t one to dismiss Judy’s instincts. Perfect. A seasoned ally she can trust, not to mention pass off as a pretend boyfriend around her relieved parents. Together, they’re following the leads. Now Judy must choose between the safe life expected of her or one hell of a dangerous story that could make her career. She might even fall in love for real. If her ambitions don’t get her killed.

by Rachel Howzell Hall - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Private investigator Sonny Rush, the newest resident of Haven, California, knows that this fogbound coastal hamlet is every bit as dangerous as her hometown of Los Angeles. And when teenager and repeat runaway Honor Butler shows up at Sonny’s door with terror in her eyes, Sonny is immediately pulled into a new case that lands close to home. Honor tells Sonny a horrifying story about where she’s been --- and what she’s been forced to do. Then, hours later, the forest near Sonny’s cottage yields the remains of a missing day laborer. Soon, coincidence sharpens into conspiracy. As Sonny digs deeper, the threads of these cases twist together into something horrifying: a ruthless network preying on the vulnerable, protected by the very people meant to uphold the law.

by Eloisa James - Fiction, Gothic, Historical Fiction, Historical Romance, Romance

Lady Genevieve Burnsby, her pet piglet and her septuagenarian husband travel to a haunted abbey in the Scottish Highlands. Evie is excited to meet a ghost, but she didn’t expect the funny, quirky guests to become the friends she’s never had. And she certainly didn’t imagine meeting Sir Godric Everly, a sardonic, witty solicitor who loathes her husband. Yet as secrets and lies turn Evie’s world upside down, Sir Godric becomes the one person she can trust. When ghosts, multiple wills and a shocking marriage certificate bring Lord Burnsby’s past crashing into his present, Burnsby promptly dies, leaving Evie free to remarry. More importantly, she has to figure out whose identity is false, whose vows are dishonorable, whose truths could destroy her reputation --- and where her heart belongs.

by Ann Patchett - Fiction

When Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than a year when Daphne was nine. Now 53, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away. While their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both. Now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

by Melanie Benjamin - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Feuding Windsor brothers and their wives --- some things, it seems, never change. Melanie Benjamin's latest work of historical fiction recreates the cataclysmic events that nearly toppled the monarchy and incited the power struggle between Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Wallis Simpson. Told from the perspectives of both women, the book propels readers into the fabulous world of the debonair Prince of Wales, café society of the 1930s, and the glittering private lives of the Windsors. The first novel to be dedicated to this infamous rivalry, THE WINDSOR AFFAIR brings us all the gossip and intrigue between the two very different --- yet perhaps more similar than they would admit --- wives of royals.

by Mary Kay Andrews - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Maeve and Therese Dunigan haven’t spoken in years. Raised under the same roof in Savannah, the two sisters could not be more opposite --- Maeve the rule follower, Therese the unapologetic rebel. But when their mother’s death pulls them back together, they inherit more than just grief: a mysterious painting that may be worth millions…if it’s real. Determined to uncover the truth --- and desperately in need of the money --- the sisters set out on a journey to Ireland, tracing their family’s roots and the origins of the portrait. What begins as a search for answers soon becomes something deeper --- a reckoning with the past, as they uncover secrets that span generations and reshape everything they thought they knew about their family.

by Kelley Armstrong - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Historical Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Mitchell has grown accustomed to life in Victorian Scotland after traveling 150 years into the past into the body of a housemaid. Even though she works as an assistant to forensic-science pioneer Dr. Duncan Gray and Detective Hugh McCreadie, she considers them true friends. Late one night, Gray and Mallory are summoned urgently to the home of Lady Adler, a patron of Gray’s undertaking business. They arrive in the midst of a seance with a ghost demanding Gray's presence. The ghost is Lady Adler's former maid, who had gone missing but now requests that Gray investigate her murder. Unsure if there's been a murder or not, Gray and Mallory are once again drawn into a mystery much more puzzling --- and more dangerous --- than it first seems.

by Melinda Leigh - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

On the three-year anniversary of true crime writer Olivia Cruz’s horrific kidnapping, she’s scheduled to walk her podcaster friend, Zoe March, through the crime scene, but Zoe fails to show. Zoe’s husband, who claims she never came home the night before, has reported her missing. But marital conflicts make the police suspect she has left him. Olivia thinks otherwise. Retracing her friend’s last steps, she finds Zoe’s phone and a text with one chilling word: Run. It soon becomes apparent that Zoe has been keeping secrets, and with her true crime podcast, there’s no telling what she has unearthed. To find her, Olivia must dig into her friend’s past. Did Zoe vanish to escape a killer, and is Olivia walking into a deadly trap?

by Katherine Center - Comedy, Fiction, Humor, Romance, Women's Fiction

After a lifetime of being bad at love, JoJo Burton vows to solve her intimacy issues once and for all at her sister’s destination wedding on a cruise ship. Armed with pop psychology, she diagnoses herself with a fixation on the neighborhood guy who was her first crush and first kiss (and who just happens to be a newly divorced wedding guest). Determined to woo him for closure, she ropes in her childhood bestie, Cooper Watts, as her wingman. Cooper: who RSVPed no but showed up anyway. Cooper: who moved to London without a word four years ago. Cooper: who broke her heart.

by Laurie Frankel - Fiction, Women's Fiction

At 77, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas --- that would be her three grown children --- but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting and confusion start. She fears it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: She’s pregnant. As word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, belly-rubbers and rubberneckers all descending on Vista View while Pepper struggles to determine her next move. Soon she has some hard decisions to make --- and some she’s not allowed to make.