Books Completed in March 2026

 Rules for Ruin, Mimi Matthews
Euphemia Flite is in debt. Rescued from a terrible life by Artemisa Corvus, proprietor of an eccentric girls' school that teaches young ladies how to overthrow the patriarchy, she's told that if she helps Miss Corvus defeat an odious man named Lord Compton, she will be free of obligations and can look forward to a life of her own.

Unfortunately, if she ruins Compton, she'll twist the plans of Gabriel Royce, a betting shop owner in a notorious poor neighborhood, who's actually using Compton to fund reforms in the area.

"Effie" is introduced to London society at a brilliant ball, where she meets Gabriel—and of course, the sparks fly. It's also a grand adventure with secrets, and a connection to Charles Dickens. Matthews writes grand books if romance mixed with history is what you like.

  Re-read: The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann Wyss

A friend was giving away some books, and I found a handsomely illustrated copy of one of my childhood favorites in the edition of which I first read it, which begins: "For many days we had been tempest-tossed. Six times had the darkness closed over a wild and terrible scene, and the light of dawn as often brought but renewed distress, for the raging storm increased in fury until on the seventh day all hope was lost." (How can you not fall in love with vocabulary like that? This is the stuff I grew up with, and Albert Payson Terhune, whose narratives and words always made me swoon.)

I discovered there are several translations on Project Gutenberg, including the "French" version, which includes the native attack that was used in the Disney film. I also found out that Jules Verne did two sequels to the book, The Later Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson and The Castaways of the Flag. (Please note that this means Verne wrote fanfiction!)

Wyss made up the story to please his own four sons (like the Fritz, Ernest, Jack, and Franz in the story), and the variety of animals they run into is almost comical, knowing about geography and habitats as I do: lions side by side with tigers, agoutis rubbing noses with kangaroos, onagers sharing the spotlight with elephants, as if all of the continents banged up against "New Switzerland" and disgorged their native species before floating away again. (Talk about continental drift!) Add in the "how to" survival manual stuff, and it's a really odd book, but I do still love it.

(And everyone knows, right, that the Swiss family's surname isn't "Robinson"?—Wyss does not mention their last name at all, nor the father's first name; the mother is Elizabeth. It's The Swiss Family "Robinson" because it's a "Robinsonade," a tale of survival on a deserted island, like Robinson Crusoe, based on the real-life sailor Alexander Selkirk.)

 Rebel With a Clause, Ellen Jovin
Ellen Jovin has been teaching grammar and writing for years, but when she decided to set a table outside her Manhattan apartment with a "Grammar Table" sign on it, she discovered just how many people wanted to discuss spelling and grammar with her, basically, "What's right and what's wrong?" So she took the "Grammar Table" on the road to every single state in the lower 48 and had her husband film the interviews.

From the Oxford comma—"a national obsession"—to telling the difference between "affect" and "effect," from whether adverbs are overused—or not—to the joys (or not) of spelling bees, everyone wanted to talk English language conundrums. This is a compilation of the best, and sometimes the funniest, grammar conversations—and you learn something in the bargain.

 The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Amy Tan
Everyone knew Amy Tan could write. But who knew she could draw so beautifully?

This is a gorgeously illustrated book about Tan's observations of the habits, quirks, and life of the birds at her feeder from 2017–2022. Bird lovers will adore. I sure did.

 Death Scene, Carol Perry
The fourteenth in the "Witch City" mysteries.

So happy Perry has continued this series! (I didn't want to read her other about Florida. Yeeech.) This time WICH-TV producer Lee Barrett Mondello, along with the rest of Salem, is invested in a new film about magic and witches being filmed at various historical sites, starring famous screen stars Darla Diamond and Lamont Faraday. Also working on the set is Doug Walker, Lee's crush from an old television show about a boy and his pet bear, someone she's dying to meet.

Then someone poisons Darla Diamond (who, according to other cast members, was pure poison herself) with something injected into her special chocolates—but the producer insists that the production go on with a body double and special effects.

There are lots of red herrings, but I guessed the killer early on. Still, it was great to see Lee, Pete, Aunt Ibbie, and the other regulars again, especially the orange tabby cat O'Ryan.

 Paris in Love, Eloisa James
I loved this story of romance writer Eloisa James, who was diagnosed with cancer just like her mother (things turned out fine for her). She convinces her Italian husband to sell everything, and they and their two children, Anna (the drama queen) and Luca (the teen cynic), move to Paris. While the children navigate going to school in a foreign language, the whole family comes to love their life in Paris. The chapters take the form of short essays on a particular aspect of French life, followed by Eloisa's diary entries. It's all very charming. I love Anna's little battles at school with the local "queen bee" student, and the stories about Alessandro's mother and how she has custody of the family dog.

Books Completed in February 2026

 Eye Spy, Mercedes Lackey
It has literally taken me years to read this book, the second of the Family Spies book, about Abidela, the second of Mags and Amily's three children. I threw it down the first time because she had a very obvious parody of a Certain Political Person in the early narrative, and I hated that Lackey wasn't more subtle about it: I would have liked to have had his identity revealed more slowly and less blatantly.

Anyway, Abi has an unusual Gift: she can sense weak spots in structures, and, because of this, she and her best friend Princess Kat were able to save people from being harmed when an unknown weak spot caused a much-used bridge to collapse. Since Abi is studying to be an Artificer (engineer), this makes her invaluable, but she needs to be instructed by Healers to get the most out of her Gift. The story follows Abi's training and then the one final mission she finds herself on before she can be called a Master Artificer, one that involves invaders from outside the kingdom of Valdemar, ones hoping to ruin that country's good name.

This was better than the parody would have led me to believe, but there's quite a lot of detail about structural engineering in the book (although it is about engineering students, after all), and the plot tends to get lost in the details. Still glad I finally read it.

 Gemini, Jeffrey Kluger
Everyone remembers Project Mercury: John Glenn, the race against the Russian space program, Gus Grissom almost drowning. And, of course Project Apollo took American astronauts to the moon.

But between them was Project Gemini, two-astronaut missions that served as the testing ground for the equipment that landed NASA astronauts on the moon: the backpacks for spacewalks, the testing of docking equipment in space, long-term missions, and studies on how long-term missions affected the human body. Usually the contributions of the Gemini missions have been summarized or simply highlighted, but this is Kluger's in-depth survey. You'll find out about the names behind the scenes along with the astronauts, like Gene Kranz and Christopher Kraft; why Scott Carpenter and John Glenn never flew again (Carpenter for the wrong reasons); and more dangerous events that were not made public at the time.

Easy to read, but a great narrative about this phase of the space program.

 Harlem Sunset, Nekesa Afia
Louise Lloyd, who as a young girl foiled a kidnapper, and rescued other kidnapped girls like herself, returns in the sequel to Dead, Dead Girls. She's living happily with her paramour Rosa Maria Moreno, and working at the Dove, owned by Rosa Maria's brother Rafael. One night a young woman spends some time after hours drinking in the Dove with the trio, who all wake up next morning to find Nora dead. The police are quick to pin the crime on Rosa Maria. Louise is also trying to save the sanity of her suicidal sister Josie, who hasn't made peace with the death of her twin, but their father's harsh dismissal of Louise's lifestyle makes this difficult.

Helped by a reporter named Harriet Sinclair and a mysterious man named Fox Schoonmaker, Louise is determined to prove Rosa Maria innocent. But twisted forces are working behind the scenes.

I didn't recall the author's sentences being so choppy in the previous book. The narrative bothered me for this reason, and I didn't enjoy it as well as the first.

 The Ex Talk, Rachel Lynn Solomon
Shay Goldstein has always loved her career in public radio, but a new employee at Pacific Public Radio is giving her figurative hives. Dominic Yun is a rising, ambitious journalist who wants to use public radio to bring down corrupt politicians, and Shay's boss Kent O'Grady is all for giving him his way. Shay thinks there's room for human-interest stories, the kind public radio does so well.

After Shay and Dominic have a friendly rivalry on a live talk show, Kent suggests they create and star in a relationship talk show in which they pretend they are ex-lovers who broke apart but remain friends. Eager to keep a human-interest show, Shay agrees, although feigning a relationship offends both her and Dominic. To their surprise, the show is a hit, and PPR's ratings soar. And Shay and Dominic, in trying to reconcile their fake relationship (no one knows it's fake except for them, Kent, and a few others), start to grow closer—and closer.

I love Solomon's characters and settings. Another great offering.

 Driving the Green Book, Alvin Hall
By now, everyone has heard of "the Green Book," thanks to a PBS documentary, a BBC radio show, and a (highly fictionalized) film, but for years, the people who knew it best were the African-American families who benefited from it. The original editor was a mail carrier who hoped to aid Black families who needed—and later wanted—to travel, for, back in the 1930s, traveling for Black families/individuals was hazardous and difficult because they were banned from hotels, restaurants, and sometimes even from whole towns. Victor Green compiled a list of boarding houses, restaurants, barber/beauty shops, and other businesses friendly to African-American travelers, who, due to bigotry, usually traveled with their own food, water, and gasoline due to a lack of these services. The last edition of the book was, sadly and incredibly, published in 1961.

Hall and his companions travel to locations listed in the Green Book, and interview people who traveled or whose relatives traveled using the book. The stories they tell are revealing, sad, and infuriating. A complicated but compelling read.

 Lighthouse Families, Cheryl Shelton-Roberts & Bruce Roberts
As a kid, I loved a horse story called "Maudie Tom, Jockey," about a wild girl brought up by her lighthouse-keeper father. I became fascinated by the lives of lighthouse-keepers' families. Found this book at the Air Force Museum, a collection of stories told to the authors by children who grew up on lighthouses. These children played unsupervised on small islands, rowed boats to school, helped their fathers keep the lamp and the lighthouse working and clean, and endured inspections during which they were supposed to keep out of sight.

Modern children, especially, would be shocked at the freedom the kids had and the antics they got into. These are first-person narratives, so you get a feeling for how they talked in the past, and their feelings about growing up as "lighthouse kids."

 Unnatural Ends, Christopher Huang
Three adopted children of a wealthy baron return home after their father dies. Alan, Roger, and Caroline had an unconventional upbringing under a stern father, who was also their tutor, and a retiring, weak mother; their one respite: a playroom in a deserted tower where they played games of Camelot. Now, returning home, they discover their father was murdered, and has indicated in his will that only one child will inherit his estate: the one who solves his murder!

Set in the early 1920s, Huang sets up a mystery worthy of the classic era, with twists galore, and grim truths.

 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: In Extremis, Ken Goddard
Ken Goddard, according to his author profile, was a former deputy sheriff, CSI police forensic scientist, and crime lab director. And boy, does it show.

This is the first of the CSI novels not written by Max Allen Collins, involving a multi-US Customs Agent shootout at a desert drug-bust. The team has to figure out who shot who and when, and how a prominent mobster some distance away was also shot at the same time as a mule deer. It's all about the procedure in this one, with minute details about the angles of the shots, the bullets used, the sophisticated hardware used. If you want to know how the crime lab works down to the details, check this one out.

 Shocking Secrets of American History, Bill Coate
This is an inexpensive little history book of "surprising and amusing tales." If you've read a lot of history, you probably know most of the trivia. Some interesting items of note: Henry Morton Stanley, who "found" David Livingstone, changed his name to cover the shocking thing he did. Alexander Hamilton never shot back.

A great bathroom or bedtime book, as the stories are told in two, or in a few cases one, pages each.

Books Completed in January 2025

 One Christmas in Washington, David Bercuson and Holger Herwig

  The Joys of Christmas 2013 -Guideposts

  Ideals Christmas 2024

 Ideals Christmas 2025

 The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah, Jean Meltzer

 Old Christmas, Washington Irving

 The Little Book of the Nativity, Dominique Foufelle

  Re-read: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

 Goodness and Light and Watch for the Light

 Quincy's Curse, Keith Robinson
In this quirky fantasy, Quincy Flack, a boy who believes he's cursed, moves to a new village with his abusive aunt and uncle (think the Dursleys) and is befriended by Megan Mugwood, a plucky girl who lives with her widowed mother, experiencing hard times since her father was killed by a dragon. Next thing you know, they've met a wizard—he says he's not—who can "grow mountains."

This is rather oddly told, from the point of view of each new character that Quincy, Megan, and Pagfire encounter, rather than the other way around, so you really don't get a whole lot of character development. But it's a fun story to see how the coincidences work out.

  Unearthing The Secret Garden, Marta McDowell
I say I didn't inherit the Italian gene for gardening; however, I can't seem to resist these garden-related books by McDowell (Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder). Maybe because I would like to have a beautiful walled garden like in the Burnett book, but don't want to do the work!

If you like The Secret Garden, you'll probably enjoy this book, as it tells an abridged version of Burnett's life, and her special affection for gardens: wherever she lived, she always had one, even if it was a leased property. If you love gardens/gardening, then this is just the book for you, with beautiful black-and-white/color photographs of Burnett in her gardens or just of the flowers in her gardens. As a bonus, the volume includes three of Burnett's short writings: an essay about her gardens, an article about the "ha-ha," an English estate feature that separated gardens from parkland, and the story of the robin that inspired the robin character in The Secret Garden.

  The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, Caitlin Rozakis
Vivian and Daniel Tanaka and their five-year-old daughter Aria were just normal people until Aria is bitten by an emotionally-disturbed werewolf. Since she can't go to a human-only school because of her unfortunate tendency to shift, sometimes in mid-play, they are forced to send her to the magical Grimoire Grammar school, where Vivian feels left out because she's only mortal, and tries to juggle Aria's magical curriculum and be part of a community. But someone seems to be targeting Aria as part of a prophecy that states the community will be destroyed.

Think PTA politics taking place at Hogwarts. The enjoyment in this book is the magical, yet mundane, universe that Rozakis builds around the Tanaka family, with gossiping, pushy parents.

  Feuds, edited by Mercedes Lackey
These are 21 new stories from Lackey's world of Valdemar, about Heralds, Bards, Healers, and recurring characters like Nwah the kyree.

I'm still really not sure that I like the "themed" volumes that they've done the last few times. Shenanigans rather bored me, although Anything With Nothing was better. I have to say about this one, though, that I enjoyed how each writer addressed "feuds" differently, with different concepts (especially the first story, which had the creepy "full circle" vibe to it), and that there's really not a bad story in the bunch. We even get a Vanyel story where he pairs up with his aunt in a story that parallels Romeo and Juliet. I got a big kick out of Vanyel posing as "Jackomo, Prince of Minstrels and Minstrel to the Prince," revealing that Misty Lackey is a fan of the wonderful Danny Kaye film The Court Jester (Kaye poses as Giacomo, King of Jesters and Jester to the King).

  The Martians, David Baron
Who hasn't heard of the Lowell Observatory? Certainly I'd heard about it, and thought Percival Lowell was a famous scientist.

He wasn't, just a rich Massachusetts dilettante from the famous Lowell family of cotton mill fame (Amy Lowell, the 19th century poet famous for "Patterns," was his sister). He went looking for novelty, including during trips abroad, where he encountered the charismatic Camille Flammarion, an astronomer who opened the minds of hundreds to the wonders of space. But the real obsession with Mars began when astronomers at the Lick Observatory spotted three lights in a triangular pattern and an Italian named Schiaparelli mapped the planet and identified lines he called "channels," translated as "canals" in English, clear evidence of life on Mars—and Martian obsession was on, with everyone from H.G. Wells to Nikola Tesla involved.

If you thought alien-mania started after Roswell, this will disabuse the notion. Illustrated with black-and-white pictures from the newspapers of the time.

 The Mating Game, Lana Ferguson
This is a companion book to Ferguson's The Fake Mate (Nate, the doctor in that novel, is related to Hunter Barrett). I wasn't enchanted by that one, but this one was half price...another omegaverse novel, this about Tess Covington, who discovers she's a late-bloomer wolf-shifter who's also an omega about to go through her first heat. Her doctors tell her it would be dangerous to take heat suppressants before her first heat, so she's advised to keep away from alphas.

Unfortunately, her next client for redesign—she and her brothers are hoping for a home redesign show on HGTV—is Hunter Barrett, a small-town lodge owner, an alpha who's avoiding romance. The prospects for the redesign are good, since the lodge is charming but how will these two stay away from each other, especially after Tess starts going into full-blown heat?

I liked this one a little better. The lodge sounds like a really nifty place and Hunter's protectiveness of Tess was very sweet.

2025 Book Challenge

Favorite Books of 2025

Another baker's dozen:

 The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl (nonfiction about birdwatching)

 The Rhine, Ben Coates (nonfiction travelogue about following the course of the Rhine River)

 The Curse of Penryth Hall, Jess Armstrong (fiction: 1920s-set mystery with a female protagonist meeting a most unusual doctor)

 The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough (nonfiction about the Americans who traveled to Paris in the early 1800s)

 It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine (nonfiction book about grieving which I bought after my husband's death)

 The Book of Murder, Matt Murphy (nonfiction about a district attorney in California)

 The New Girl, Cassandra Calin (yeah, children's fiction and a graphic novel: Romanian girl moves to Quebec due to her mother's job and learns to adjust)
 
  Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty (nonfiction about working in a crematorium)
 
  The Cloisters, Katy Hays (dark academia fiction about a small-town girl accepting a job at The Cloisters in New York City for the summer)
 
  The Yankee Road: Volume 3, Apotheosis, James D. McNiven (nonfiction in which McNiven finally finishes his odyssey of U.S. 20)
 
  Written in Bone, Sue Black (nonfiction by a forensic specialist about the human skeleton with notes from her cases)
 
  Love is a War Song, Danica Nava (fiction about a Native American singer who angers her fans who is sent out to her grandmother's ranch to lie low, but instead learns about her heritage)

  The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson (nonfiction--Wilson's sweeping narrative about the Native Americans in North America)

Honorable Mention:
  Good Spirits, B.K. Borison (fiction: if The Ghost and Mrs. Muir television series ended happily)

 
Most Disappointing: A tie between James (started off promisingly with James teaching the kids how to talk and act in front of white people, then went off the track with him working at the minstrel show) and Lessons in Chemistry (the real-life struggles of professional women in the 1950s and early 60s clothed in absurdity including a dog named Six-Thirty who thinks like a human, ironically the most interesting character in the book besides Calvin).

Books Completed in December 2025

 A Spell for Midwinter's Heart, Morgan Lockhart

 A Wiltshire Christmas, compiled by John Chandler

 Murder at Holly House, Denzil Meyrick

  Re-read: Christmas After All: The Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift, Kathryn Lasky

 Santa Claus Worldwide, Tom A. Jerman

 Re-read: Sleigh Bells for Windy Foot, Frances Frost

 Good Spirits, B.K. Borison

 The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg

 Re-read: The Tuckers: The Cottage Holiday, Jo Mendel

 The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, Ally Carter