Happy Friday, all! I have a pile of new books I ought to be reading (and two books I ought to be writing!) but I’ve retreated back to my happy place, the village life of an England that never was but ought to have been (as George MacDonald Fraser would say) with a combination of…

Happy Friday, all! I madly binged the rest of Jodie Taylor’s Elizabeth Cage series, Dark Light and Long Shadows, about a woman leading a quiet life who suddenly finds herself plunged into danger, government machinations, and odd supernatural happenings. I wasn’t quite ready to leave that world yet, so I moved on to the first…

Happy Friday, all! This week I read a book that’s not out yet, that goes by the unlikely title of Two Wars and A Wedding.  Yep, I was reading through the final proofs of my spring 2023 book (aka the Cuba book, aka the Greece book, aka the 1890s book, aka Smith Book II: the…

Happy Friday, all! I started off the week with Ann Mah’s luminous Jacqueline in Paris.  Jacqueline Kennedy is such a well known character and there are so many layers of assumption and expectation and legend lacquered onto her that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could chip through all that to the young girl underneath– but…

Happy Friday, all! It’s a particularly happy Friday for me, because I’m finally back at my desk for the first time since May 10th!  There have been a lot of planes, trains, and automobiles in the meantime, which has meant a lot of reading time.  I have to confess that I don’t remember all that…

Hello from House of Plague! With two poor little ones hit hard by Influenza A, I’ve mostly been reading the dosage guidelines on the sides of the Children’s Motrin bottles.  But when I’ve been able to get away from sponging brows and wiping noses, I’ve been reading M.L. Longworth’s Death at the Chateau Bremont.  I…

Happy Friday, all! It’s been rather a rocky week with sneezing small people, book tour prep, and all the things, so there was less reading time in there than I would have liked.   I did, however, go back to T. Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone, and loved it on the second go, especially since about a…

Happy Friday, all! I started the week off with the most recent in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series (think Harry Potter meets police procedural with a secret supernatural police unit in modern London).  This one opens with a man killed by magic in London’s silver vaults, and, unsurprisingly, soon-to-be-dad Peter Grant is on the…

Happy Friday, all! After a week of winter in April, it’s finally starting to feel like spring!  So to launch off the new springy season, I left aside my comfort reads and picked up the ARC of Susan Elia MacNeal’s first ever stand alone, Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, which takes a close look at the…

Happy Friday, all! A few people have mentioned The Inheritance Games to me as Westing Game for Grown Ups, but a post from Beyond the Bookends finally made me dredge the book out of the wastes of my TBR pile– and I’m so glad I did.  Think Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious crossed with the Westing…