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:…

Thanks to my friend Vicki (hi, Vicki!), I had a pile of new books to read this week. They were all very different and all excellent. First up? The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders. Those of you who are frequent readers of this site will know that Kate Saunders’s The Marrying Game and Bachelor…

Perhaps it’s something about fall, but I’ve been on an old school Gothic kick this past week. I started with Anna Lee Huber‘s upcoming book, Secrets in the Mist, a Regency set Gothic involving misty marshes, a mysterious creature named “The Lantern Man”, and, of course, smugglers. From there, I moved on to some old…

As I finish up the revisions on the Gilded Age book (more about that soon, I promise!), I’ve been doing my best to read outside of my comfort zone, to try new genres and authors– or, at least, books I wouldn’t have picked up on my own. This week? — Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, involving a…

Happy Labor Day weekend! This week I belatedly discovered Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook, in which a high ranking official in a top top secret organization finds herself plunging back into her old life after being stripped of her memories by a traitor. It’s a little bit Rivers of London and a little bit James Bond…