Weekly Reading Round-Up
It’s always a joy discovering a new series. Instant reading material! This week, I moved on to book two in the Invisible Library series, The Masked City. These books remind me so much of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. Anyone else remember and love those? After that, I zigzagged back to Scotland and women’s fiction…
Read MorePink Books in Forbes Magazine!
In the “random but wonderful” category, a quote from one of the Pink Carnation books was featured in last week’s Forbes Magazine! I am so thrilled to be hanging out there with Agatha Christie and Dom Perignon. (Especially Dom Perignon! Pass the bubbly, please….) The quote in question is from The Garden Intrigue, Augustus Whittlesby…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
So many thanks to Alison for recommending Frederica! This is, indeed, an excellent Heyer, with all the best Heyer features: a lofty hero rendered human by an unlikely heroine, comic side characters, and an enforced stay in an inn (Heyer does excellent comic relief with enforced stays at inns: see also Sprig Muslin and The…
Read MoreTHE ENGLISH WIFE– and the kindness of authors
When I typed that title, I had Tennessee Williams on the brain, but, really, it should be more of a collective noun: a kindness of authors. A kindness of authors was wonderful enough to take time out of their own insane writing schedules to take an early look at The English Wife and share their…
Read MoreTHE ENGLISH WIFE– Goodreads Give-Away!
Summer may be over, but that doesn’t mean it’s all grim and glum. There are pumpkin spice lattes to look forward to, plaid skirts, and red, orange and yellow leaves… and 150 advance copies of The English Wife up for grabs on Goodreads! Between now and September 16th, St. Martin’s Press is very generously handing…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
How is it September already? I saw out the summer with winter in Scotland: Alexandra Raife’s Until the Spring, in which a pregnant woman seeks refuge with her lover’s family in a remote Scottish manor house after being tossed out by her adoptive parents. This Alexandra Raife book in particular is oh so very Britain…
Read MoreTop Five Heyers
The other day, when I posted about my recent Heyer-a-thon, a funny thing happened in the Comments section: an impromptu discussion of Top Five Heyer novels. Not four shall you count, not six, but five. (Sorry, Monty Python.) Why five? Perhaps because it’s so impossible to pick just one Heyer. Or, for that matter, three…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
Nobody does comic relief quite as elegantly as Georgette Heyer, the woman who invented the Regency romance. So, this week, in honor of Heyer’s birthday, I read two Heyer novels I had somehow missed out on over the years: Cotillion and Venetia. If there are any Mischief of the Mistletoe fans out there, then hie…
Read MoreWeekly Reading Round-Up
On tap for this week have been: — Eva Chase’s Black Rabbit Hall, a dark Gothic (think echoes of The Thirteenth Tale), with a surprisingly upbeat ending, set in a moldering manor house in Cornwall; — Barbara Michaels’s Wait for What Will Come, because once you read one Gothic set in a moldering Cornish manor…
Read MoreWriter's Digest Conference– This Weekend!
When we were teenagers, many of my friends had subscriptions to Seventeen Magazine. I had a subscription to Writer’s Digest. Back in the days before the internet, I remember the thrill of the magazine’s arrival, eagerly reading through articles on viewpoint, pacing, research, publishing nitty gritty (back when it was more nitty than gritty). Because…
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