REVIEW:

Madame Burova is a Tarot card and palm reader, and while I have neither of those skills I still might be able to predict if you’ll like Ruth Hogan’s latest novel or not.

Yes:

• You enjoy dual-timeline stories. Here one is set in Brighton in the 1970s and one is in present-day London.

• Mystical, magical realism-adjactent elements appeal, as Madame Burova’s psychic talents make her at home among a colorful cast of entertainers at a holiday camp on the Brighton Pier.

• You’re interested in adoption journeys, because readers follow the story of Billie as she learns upon the death of her father that she was actually an abandoned baby that he and her mother took in.

No:

• You cannot handle any storylines about the mistreatment of animals. There’s a poor, abused and neglected Collie referenced throughout the novel, and while the resolution of that thread is satisfying it’s still hard to read.

On the whole, The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova is a lovely story for readers of character-driven fiction. I’ve only read one other book by Ruth Hogan, but my crystal ball tells me there are more of them in my future.

My thanks to the author and William Morrow / Custom House for the advance readers copy to review via NetGalley. The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova is now available.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

From the wildly popular bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things - an uplifting, slightly magical story about how it's never too late to find out who you really are.

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 Brighton 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, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do - to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before 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... which leads to Brighton, the pier, and directly to Madame Burova's door.

In a story spanning over fifty years, Ruth Hogan has conjured a magical world of 1970s holiday camps and seaside entertainers, eccentrics, heroes and villains, the lost and the found. Young people will make careless choices which echo down the years.... but it's never too late to put things right.