Happy Friday, all!  I hope everyone had a wonderful, safe, and happy holiday.

A chance re-encounter with a Victoria Holt novel last week set me off on a mad Victoria Holt kick, and ever since then I’ve been wallowing in all the 6th grade feels with plucky schoolmistresses, brooding hero/villains, and wonderfully improbable plots.  I started off with On the Night of the Seventh Moon, which I loved back in 6th grade (novels set in small Germanic principalities pre-Bismarck were kind of one of my things). It’s utterly mad.  So fun.  Utterly mad.

I decided to stick with moons, and moved straight on to The Time of the Hunter’s Moon, which was one of my less preferred Holts back in the day, but which I found myself madly loving now.  It has all the perfect Gothic elements: the plucky schoolmistress, a loveable aunt straight out of Anne of Green Gables, obstreperous girls won over by plucky schoolmistress, a crumbling abbey, and, of course, the dangerous hero/villain who is instantly smitten (on his way home from the funeral of his wife who he might possibly have murdered, as brooding hero/villains are wont to be rumored to do).  Mostly, I loved how, in the midst of all the Heavy Gothic Atmosphere, the heroine keeps taking all the wind out of the hero’s sails.  It’s her attitude of “nice try, but wasn’t that just a little bit ridiculous?” that really carries the whole thing.  Because there’s nothing like a heroine who can make the hero laugh– at himself.  (Why, yes, these WERE the covers I had back in the 80s!)

Right now, I’ve moved on to The India Fan, another Holt from back when that I remember being so so about at the time, but I’m enjoying now.  (It’s fascinating how different my memory of the book is from what I’m reading now— the gap between fourteen and forty-four?)

What have you been reading this week?

In other news:

— Band of Sisters is a BookBub/Black Friday deal today!  If you’re looking for something to read while the turkey settles, you can snap it up for $2.99 on Kindle or Nook— without having to fight your way through the Black Friday crowds!

— The registration for this month’s Pink Carnation Read Along is live!  This month will be the holiday novella “Ivy & Intrigue” with super special guest host Stephanie Barron.