Which has been more like monthly reading round-up around here recently…. Sorry, all! That’s partly because, instead of fiction, a lot of my recent reading has looked like this: Back in fiction land, I’ve been on a Julian Kestrel binge. For those who haven’t stumbled on them yet, they’re Regency-set mysteries, featuring dandy sleuth Julian…

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…