Jennifer Cameron-Smith
@fionnabhair.bsky.social
📤 88
📥 13
📝 172
Reader, cross-stitcher, quilter, and grower of roses :-)
Publication date: 28 October 2025
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of A Disappearing Act
4/5: Marnie Elliott, a bestselling author, has invited her three oldest friends to join her for a holiday in southern Tasmania. Twenty-five years ago, in 1999, the four of them: Sarah, Xanthea, Poppy ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7930220687
about 13 hours ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The White Crow (Philomena McCarthy, #2)
4/5: ‘In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that line almost sixty years before I was born but it’s true enough today.’ Philomena (Ph...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7929016252
5 days ago
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Highly recommended:
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Star on the Grave
5/5: I was led to this novel by the review written by one of my Chief Reading Enablers, Lisa https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/08/30/the-star-on-the-grave-2024-by-linda-margolin-royal/ . And through this novel, I learned of another aspect of World War II. Before I read this novel, I knew nothing about the six thousand Jewish refugees saved from the Nazis who had escaped Europe via Japan. I had not heard of Chiune Sugihara, whose actions in defiance of the Japanese government’s orders, wrote transit visas for those fleeing Lithuania. Similarly, I had not heard of Jan Zwartendijk, an official of the N...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7895527147
12 days ago
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Recommended! Publication is either later this month, or October.
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Seed
4/5: Mitchell and Frances are scientists, working on the Anarctos project, a seed vault in an isolated location in Antarctica. The seed vault is a biodiversity insurance policy against the impact of a...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7908812180
12 days ago
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Publication date: 28/10/2025
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Tangled Web
4/5: Set in Sydney and Maitland, Ms Cooper’s latest novel opens in 1892 with Viola Oswald mourning the death of her beloved brother, Sebastian. Sebastian suffered from haemophilia. Viola’s mother is p...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7885028700
14 days ago
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Publication date: 28 October 2025
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Hiding Place
4/5: Four families have bought a long-abandoned mining town in the Australian bush. Lou saw the ad and convinced family and friends that purchasing it was a good idea: a return to nature, and a way to...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7872979326
15 days ago
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Publication date 28 October 2025. Another terrific novel from Ms Nell.
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Funeral Crashers
4/5: Intrigued by the title, I was delighted to have an opportunity to read this book. Martin Pottinger, a retired academic, is presently sharing his home with his somewhat eccentric elderly mother, E...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7805401233
19 days ago
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Publication date: 30 September 2025
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Road Trip
4/5: Yes, I know that there are some who would see a caravan trip through the centre of Australia as the trip of a lifetime. And while I am not one of them, I was keen to see where Ms Stringer would t...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7862344859
19 days ago
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20 days ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Three Lives of Cate Kay
3/5: Who is Cate Kay? It took me a while to get into this novel (I read it as part of a reading challenge) and even longer to care about the story. And I’ll confess: some aspects really annoyed me. ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7816489613
27 days ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Good Losers
4/5: A very long time ago, I lived in Launceston, in northern Tasmania. As a member of the lower classes, the realm of rowing was totally foreign to me. Except, sometimes, I saw the upper classes (mos...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7811128576
28 days ago
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Publication date: 30/9/2025
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Murder on North Terrace
4/5: After thoroughly enjoying the first novel in this series (The Death of Dora Black), I was delighted to have an opportunity to read the second novel, which opens six months later. In September 19...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7791899325
28 days ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Sins of the Fathers
4/5: In the prologue, set in 1898, a man makes a choice which will lead him to prison. The story then shifts to 1910, where Billy and Tommy Smith live with their mother in Sydney’s Miller’s Point. The...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7799218659
29 days ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Stone Sky Gold Mountain
5/5: In Ms Riwoe’s novel, which takes place in 1877 in the Palmer River goldfields of Far North Queensland, Mei Ying and her brother Lai Yue have left China to try to make enough money to redeem their...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7763942073
about 1 month ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Persians
1/5: ‘For a week it was a nonstop party of drugs and cartoons until an hour ago when I bailed my Auntie Shirin out of the Aspen jail after her arrest for attempted prostitution.’ During the course of...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7795467835
about 1 month ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Five Found Dead
4/5: ‘Murderers? In the Orient Express? Whoever heard of such a thing?’ Timing is everything, and I am pleased I read this novel after safely arriving in Perth on Australia’s magnificent transcontinental train, the Indian Pacific. Otherwise, my imagination – overstimulated by this novel - might have kept me awake at night… Crime fiction author Joe Penvale and his twin sister Meredith board the Orient Express in Paris. Joe’s writing life has been on pause while he has undergone intense lifesaving medical treatment and Meredith hopes that this trip will inspire him to write again. And, after thei...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7839144398
about 1 month ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Thunderhead
4/5: A day in the life of Winona Dalloway… Step inside the head of Winona Dalloway, a young mother juggling … everything. Today she is particularly busy: she has two young children, several appointme...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7829776485
about 1 month ago
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An important book.
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Ruptured
5/5: I was alerted to the existence of this book by Lisa, one of my Chief Reading Enablers. I bought an electronic copy immediately and started to read – slowly. On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists w...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7794757652
about 1 month ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Kingmaker
3/5: ‘Hers is a story of virtually everyone who was anyone in the twentieth century …’ Wikipedia states that Pamela Beryl Harriman (née Digby; 20 March 1920 – 5 February 1997), also known as Pamela C...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7793205947
about 2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Unconventional Women
4/5: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia Growing up in Launceston Tasmania in the 1960s and early 1970s I have only vague memories of some nuns (the Presentation Sisters, off...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7784243016
about 2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of King of Ashes
4/5: ‘Everything burns.’ If I had to summarise this book in three words, I would say ‘haunting and tragic’. Haunting because the characters have taken up residence in my mind, tragic because I see no...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7775024427
about 2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Warmth of Other Suns
5/5: ‘From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to ma...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7738691028
2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Silverborn (Nevermoor, #4)
4/5: ‘Winter’s last midnight ticked closer.’ Well, it has been a long five years between instalments of Nevermoor, but picking up the fourth book in the series was like rejoining a group of (mostly) ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7769485616
2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Careless People
3/5: ‘I was there [at Facebook] for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in a sentence, I’d say that it started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret.’ I picked up this book because...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7728797744
2 months ago
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at Hahndorf, South Australia 17/7/2025
2 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of James
4/5: ‘I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham.’ The Mississippi River 186. When Jim overhears that he is about ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7705438951
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Free Ride
4/5: ‘Now, five years after my first motorcycling adventure, I have gathered the courage to share these experiences.’ Noraly Schoenmaker has a YouTube channel (Itchy Boots - YouTube) https://www.yout...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7705580300
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Delirious
4/5: Never get old. My late father-in-law always offered me that advice. And now, some thirty-three years after his death, and over a decade since my own parents died, I am starting to wish I could t...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7671673978
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940
4/5: ‘The status quo in Europe was being challenged by the totalitarian dictatorships, of the left and right — Stalin’s Bolshevik Russia, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy — and by the sudden rise of Hitler i...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7653202616
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Orpheus Nine
3/5: ‘It began in every town and city at the same time, in every dark and twisted corner of our world.’ Imagine a world in which nine-year-old children die, en masse, in a sudden simultaneous ritual ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7704348296
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Last Murder at the End of the World
4/5: ‘Streaking away from this moment are dozens of possible futures, each waiting to be conjured into existence by a random event, an idle phrase, a miscommunication or an overheard conversation.’ F...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7705436760
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Death at Booroomba
4/5: ‘The evening was quiet, apart from the wailing of gulls that a light breeze blew Jack’s way, and the hooting of a tugboat that was guiding a ship up Sydney Harbour.’ In 1915, just before embarki...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7710712459
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Conclave
4/5: Sede vacante This novel was first published in 2016, was made into a successful movie which was released at the end of 2024. Like many others, I read this book just after the last papal conclave...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7671674583
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Bluff
3/5: A missing girl and a murder … I recently read Ms Jenkins’s first novel, featuring lawyer Ruth Dawson and was keen to see how Ruth would transition from the dramas of her previous position as par...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7692224501
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of L.A. Women
3/5: Friendships can be complicated … On the face of it, Gala Margolis and Lane Warren are two very different women. They meet in Los Angeles in the 1960s and despite their differences are drawn to e...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7541194815
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Excitable Boy
4/5: ‘I am trying to piece together the events that have led me to be here in this room with an old man trapped in 1989, a kid with an acquired brain injury, and a girl struggling to survive. I’ve bee...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7696321000
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Heart, Be at Peace
4/5: ‘Isn’t it funny how history repeats and repeats? Like an ouroboros eating itself over and over again, we come back upon ourselves doing the same things in different ways, different settings for t...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7697926548
3 months ago
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An amazing read.
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of There Are Rivers in the Sky
5/5: ‘Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.’ The...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7636086422
3 months ago
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Canberra, 20/6/2025
3 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Surgeon of Royaumont
5/5: ‘You’ve spent years training for this, Doctor Heywood … Now is your chance.’ Sydney, February 1914. Doctor Clara Heywood is one of a handful of female medical graduates working at the Royal Prin...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7614325024
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Lyrebird
4/5: ‘Head thrown back, beak wide, tail feathers open and shaking, the bird was mimicking the sounds of human terror, the way she had heard other lyrebirds mimic chainsaws, car alarms and every other ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7608892481
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Haunting of Kenmore Asylum
4/5: ‘I watch them come and go.’ Set across three different timelines Ms Carpenter’s novel takes the reader into the Kenmore Psychiatric Hospital in Goulburn, NSW. Part historical fiction and part ho...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7620442873
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Lost Souls
4/5: ‘This is a book about refugees, thus necessarily a story involving suffering and loss.’ Europe in 1945 was a disaster. Cities and economies destroyed, millions of people dead. Millions of people...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7597332101
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of Fulvia
4/5: The best historical fiction brings the past to life. Names become people, striding out of the past and into the reader’s present. In her debut novel, Ms Parker brings aspects of the late Roman Re...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7608986184
4 months ago
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Publication date 2/7/2025
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Whisky Widow
4/5: Scotland, 1780. Greer MacAlister receives word that her husband, an excise man, has died. She and her daughter Fenella (Fen) travel from Edinburgh to Montrose to collect money owed to him. But th...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7593872345
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Forsaken (A Logan Booth Thriller Book 1)
4/5: ‘I killed people for the government …. That’s all I did for ten years.’ Logan Booth has killed hundreds of men, but when he learns that he was a hitman for the CIA (instead of working for a band...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7481942820
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Girls Who Grew Big
4/5: ‘I’ll put it this way: teen moms, like Florida, are the country’s favorite scapegoat.’ Ms Mottley’s insights into the lives and issues of disadvantaged youth in her debut novel ‘Nightcrawling’ h...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7309994638
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of The Unquiet Grave (Cormac Reilly #4)
4/5: Yes, I have read this novel twice. ;-) ‘What she was seeing was a human back, a curved spine, and a tangled mess that was human hair.’ Galway, Ireland. A body is found in a bog. While Detective...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7341083598
4 months ago
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of A Disappearance in Fiji
4/5: ‘Singh. My office.’ Set in colonial Fiji in 1914, this novel introduces Sergeant Akmal Singh, a twenty-five-year-old police officer who has been banished to Fiji after a professional mistake in ...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7589603951
4 months ago
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Publication date: 10 June 2025
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Jennifer (JC-S)'s review of A Shipwreck in Fiji (A Sergeant Akal Singh Mystery Book 2)
4/5: Set in colonial Fiji in 1915, this is the second novel in Ms Rao’s series featuring Sergeant Akal Singh. Sergeant Singh is still seen as an outsider by most members of this sharply segregated com...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7575665083
4 months ago
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