Happy January, all! To kick off the New Year, I’ve been reading: — Snowdrift and Other Stories, a Georgette Heyer short story collection, featuring three rediscovered stories. (For those of you who have read Pistols for Two, it’s Pistols for Two plus three.) Of course, I loved them. You can’t beat Georgette Heyer for historical…

Happy Friday, all! This week, I read: — Trisha Ashley’s Twelve Days of Christmas, which has become something of a holiday go-to read for me, in part for all the descriptions of holiday cooking. Mmm, mince pies. You can’t go wrong with a stately manor, a brooding owner, dotty side characters, and fictional meals cooked…

My find for this week? Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, brought to you courtesy of a wet day, a conveniently located bookstore, and ten minutes to kill before school pick-up. Set in Singapore, New York, London, and Paris, it’s a deftly written social satire focusing on Singapore’s old money set– which, like old money sets…

Happy Thanksgiving! (Or really, Happy Black Friday!) I was in an epic mood this week, so I revisited a very old favorite: Joan Wolf’s Born of the Sun, about a sixth century Saxon king of Wessex and his British wife, Niniane. There are court intrigues, family strife, battles– and, of course, a wonderful love story,…

This week, in between working on the outline for the new Team W book with Beatriz Williams and Karen White, I treated myself to two new books: Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Sherry Thomas’s A Study In Scarlet Women. Although very different, both are takes on earlier stories: Uprooted builds off previous generations of fairy tales…

Sometimes, you just need a fairy tale. This week, I revisited one of my all time favorites, Robin McKinley’s Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast. It’s a beautiful re-telling of Beauty and the Beast– with certain elements in common with the Disney version that followed, like Beauty being a bookworm…

It has been a banner book week for me. So good, in fact, that I can’t imagine what I’ll read next. First up? Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls. Here’s the unofficial blurb as relayed to me by Simone: In 1950 Vermont, four lonely girls in a remote boarding school protect each other against the…

It struck me recently that I haven’t read any of my “keeper” books in a while. Not the books that I’ve discovered in the past five years or so that I’ve read and re-read, but the books that have come with me from grade school to college to grad school and so on: The Blue…

The final edits on the next novel are IN! So I’ve been rewarding myself with two books I’ve saved for just such an occasion: — Susan Elizabeth Philips’s latest, First Star I See Tonight, which returns us to the world of the Chicago Stars with a former quarterback turned nightclub owner and a scrappy private…

I’ve been in a bit of a book slump, picking up and putting down old favorites:The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson, Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books, Angela Thirkell’s Northbridge Rectory (not my favorite of her Barsetshire books). But nothing seems to quite fit the moment. So help me break through my reading block:…