When you’re dealing with cranky small people with flu, only comfort re-reads will do. This week, I resorted to Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook, which passed the test of being just as amusing on a second read. A sci fi/mystery combo, the book follows a woman, highly placed in a top secret paranormal organization, who comes…

Hello from book tour! One of the best parts of book tour is the long flights. Not because of the airplane coffee or those little cookies in wrappers. No. It’s having five or six uninterrupted hours to read. As I zigzagged back and forth across the country this week, I read: — Imbolo Mbue’s Behold…

It’s been a very seasonal week for me. I finished up a re-read of Trisha Ashley’s A Winter’s Tale, skipped spring, and went straight on to Jamie Brenner’s The Forever Summer, a multi-stranded narrative set in a B&B in Cape Cod about finding family and oneself. Because sometimes you just need a little summer in…

There’s something about the week between Christmas and the New Year, when the world goes calm and still, that invites curling up with a blanket, a steaming cup of something caffeinated, and a pile of books. There are so many books I associate with this particular week of the year, although the one that leaps…

As the countdown to Christmas continues, I’ve been on a Jenny Colgan Christmas book binge, reading the two sequels to Sweetshop of Dreams: Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop and The Christmas Surprise. Now that I’m approaching the end of the last one, I feel quite at a loss for what to read next. I have…

It’s the most reading-ful time of the year? If not that, it’s certainly a good time of year to brew a cup of tea and read over the head of a (hopefully) sleeping baby while the wind wuthers around the windows and the radiator creaks and groans. On my list this past week? A Bed…

Happy December! There’s something about that post-Thanksgiving lull (and working on revisions) that just calls for comfort reading. For me, that means mysteries and British chick lit. I dipped into Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series with A Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary, in the latter of which one of my…

There’s something about crisp fall weather and new (or new to me) books that just go together. This week, I’ve dipped into: — Laurie King’s Pirate King. I leapt over several intervening books to get to this one, but how could any lifelong Pirates of Penzance fan resist the lure of Pirates AND Mary Russell?…

When the weather gets crisp and the sky begins to go gray at four, it makes me think– well, yes, of London, but also of the New York of twenty-odd years ago, the scarred dark woodwork and nubby blue chairs of my school’s library, and the books I read in those chairs: Mary Stewart, Victoria…

My Halloween treat this year was re-reading Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls, which was, impossibly, even better on a second read. I never thought I’d love anything as much as Simone St. James’s 1920s ghost stories (Because, 1920s. And ghost stories. Enough said.), but this modern/1950s dual timeline story is even better. It comes…