You cannot read books about Star Trek fanfiction without seeing Joanna Russ mentioned: she was a feminist and science-fiction writer who was also a member of the LGBTQIA community. She not only wrote essays about whether science fiction and fantasy are legitimate literature, but ones where feminism and misogyny are addressed. This is a collection of those essays. The few that justify SF&F as lit are interesting, but the meat of the book comes where she begins talking about feminist issues. One essay addresses "feminist" books written by men, in which the ruling class of women turn out to be just as corrupt as men, and end up being "tamed" by the healing power of male sex! Another points a finger at Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog," although she admits the movie is more at fault than the story.
My favorite essay in this book is her essay about the very popular "modern Gothic" novels of the 1970s. I remember these things all over the bookstores, with the pretty heroine always marrying some type of brooding male who was hiding some secret (shades of Mr. Rochester!). It's pointed and humorous at the same time.
Julia Wychwood is a heiress with a problem: her sickly parents expect her either to nurse them through their (usually psychosomatic) illnesses or make a good match. Julia, an introvert who prefers her books and horse riding to socializing, hates going to parties, and just wants to be left alone to read. But her parents believe reading novels is "inflaming" her and keep having the doctor bleed her, sometimes until she is totally debilitated.
The "notorious Captain Jasper Blunt," the harsh hero of Waterloo, is in search of a bride, or more appropriately, a bridal dowry that can replenish his Yorkshire estate and provide for his two bastard children. Why would Julia Wychwood not do as a bride? They both love books—in fact, the same author's books—and he agrees that he will let her live her own life (and rescue her from her parents) if she will take care of his children. But her parents have found a more appropriate—older, with better social connections—match for her and they will manipulate her as much as they can. In the meantime Julia and Jasper grow closer, but one of them is harboring a secret.
This is an enjoyable takeoff on Beauty and the Beast with two book lovers from different worlds, but who bond over their love of books. I kind of guessed the secret one of the protagonists was keeping about halfway through the book, but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the story—except I wanted to beat the crap out of Julia's parents, who considered her some hired slavey, just given birth to provide them comfort.
This book illustrates my problems with e-books. I read this first as an e-book, and dismissed it. Then I picked it up as a remainder book, and enjoyed it a lot more. Rioux first talks about Alcott's history and the reason she wrote the book—her publisher requested "a book for girls." This perplexed Alcott, as she claimed she didn't "know any girls," except for her sisters, so she wrote her story around her family life—and her simple narrative became a hit.
Over the decades, Little Women has remained popular, although its audience has changed: boys, for instance, were also readers of the book in its early days; now it's considered "too girlie." Others believe that with today's mores Little Women, with its themes of traditional femininity, having nothing to say to modern girls, while Rioux refutes this, since both contemporary men and women need to learn lessons of controlling their temper, keeping house, etc. Media versions are also considered, and modern girls' stories as compared to Alcott's classic.
If you're an Alcott fan, and I am, this book will exactly suit.
In this seventh book in Maxwell's Gilded Newport series, it's the summer of 1898, and Emma Cross, distant relative to the Vanderbilts (the poor side of the family) is working as acting editor-in-chief at her fiance's paper, the Newport Messenger. When she must fill in for the society editor at the wealthy Fishes' Harvest Festival, she, like the rest of the crowd, is awaiting the arrival of the guest of honor, Price Otto of Austria. But he never shows up, and then turns up in the garden, dead, his method of death very close to a man who was found on Bailey's Beach a few days earlier. When Emma investigates the beach death, she is stunned to discover the victim looks familiar—in fact, like her half-brother, but older. Could this be his father?
In the meantime, a series of mishaps at the Messenger convince Emma that someone is trying to sabotage the paper, or at least her editorship of it.
Mamie Fish, the eccentric—and she and her husband are based on the true-life Mamie and Stuyvesant Fish, who really were loving and eccentric as portrayed in the novel—owner of Crossways joins Emma as she investigates both crimes, and she's a definite plus in this story. Oh, and Emma finally has a new horse and poor Barney is finally retired.
You can't read anything about Eleanor Roosevelt without a mention of Lorena Hickok, the brash woman journalist Eleanor met when her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on his original presidential campaign trail. She and "Hick" became best friends—in fact, in reading their letters you might say they were more than just best friends.
Whether you believe or not that the two women also had a physical relationship or that they were platonic lovers, but lovers indeed, they did share intimacies over the course of their friendship that helped the First Lady break away from negative influences. Hick had her own bad habits: she was a chronic workaholic, smoked heavily, and didn't take care of her diabetes, and eventually her possessiveness—since Eleanor eventually had many friends, including those Hick was jealous of—strained their friendship to the breaking point. This is a vivid story of two women, one (Hick) who had to be strong after being thrown out of the house at age fourteen and the other (Eleanor) who was raised "with a silver spoon" that nevertheless came with a bleak childhood and an adult experience that included her husband cheating on her, having a child die, and having to nurse her husband through polio.
Very enjoyable especially if you are an Eleanor Roosevelt aficionado as I am.
Kordas Valdemar and the people who have followed him to escape the cruelties and the smothering rule of the Empire now take steps to move beyond the lake they emerged from through a magical gate.
This is the next part of the "Founding of Valdemar" saga, and it was a good read, just not as compelling as the first book. A lot of the story is about Kordas' good faith efforts to be a just leader, and his learning to become a good leader as the Valdemarian expedition searches for a permanent place to live without displacing any of the people already there. The mage storms have left their mark, and they are attacked by deadly, unusual creatures who were melded together by weird magic, and come upon a sinister forest that projects malevolence.
While the statecraft bits can make the book drag a little, Delia, Kordas' sister-in-law, undergoes a transformation in this book, from little sister with a serious crush on Kordas to an explorer and much-needed member of the scouting team, her own person.
With a little help from the Hawkbrothers and the hertasi, Kordas and his people find a place to spend the winter. Could this be the place to settle?
Looking forward to the next volume! Have come to love Kordas and his people.
I bought this because in looking through it discovered Black, a forensic scientist, using her skills to identify dead bodies found at crime scenes. However, this is so much more: the author discusses death itself, the nature of our fears about death, and about working with corpses and how she is thankful for the people who donate their bodies to science so that she can learn about the human body from real remains rather than computer simulations, which she states are poor imitations of learning anatomy from bodies. She even tells a story about a elderly man who is preparing to donate his body to her institution who insists on coming into the anatomy laboratory and watching the students dissect a body so he will know everything that will happen to his corpse—definitely a braver person than I'll ever be.
I'm pretty squeamish about death (having been afraid of dying since I was quite young), but I found this fascinating reading, if even a little comforting, but I would definitely not read if things like this trigger you. There are some very explicit scenes of dissection and discussion of preserving bodies for dissection.
I hadn't read the rest of my Jade del Cameron books in ages. This one, number six, is an action-fan's dream. Jade's great love, the movie maker Sam Featherstone, has not yet returned from the United States, and the once fearless Jade had, in the interim, gone back to France and seen an eerie vision of her dead fiancé David Worthy, killed in the carnage of The Great War. Now back in Kenya, she is receiving notes from David and seeing visions of him. Her friends tell her she needs to relax and hope Sam will return soon; then Jade almost witnesses a car accident at a bridge in which a car was deliberately pushed off the side. This is only the beginning of a murder investigation and more—in which Jade begins to suspect her one true foe: David's evil mother Lilith.
This book gets off with a bang and never quite stops moving. I figured out part of what was causing Jade's distress almost immediately, but it didn't spoil the rising tension and the heart-stopping climax. I'm sorry there's only one of these unread left. Probably the best of the books since the first, Mark of the Lion.
I had to pick this up for Women's History month. In general I enjoyed it, although it was more scholarly than I expected. The basic premise is that although most society was patriarchal in the past, men had their roles and women had equally as important, but different, roles. However, with the coming of industrialization came masculinism, which infantilized women, drove away "wise women" and midwives who knew the workings of women's bodies, and turned them over to male doctors, who had all sorts of fantastically weird ideas, like that menstruation messed with a woman's sense of reason, that all women automatically wanted to be nurturing wives and mothers, and that women's brains were not fit for more complicated reasoning—studying things like medicine, physics, chemistry, etc. would make them "less womanly" and might even burn out a woman's brain! (And with that came the "rest cure" as Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which would drive anyone stark raving mad.) Just the change in nurturing children between 1900 and 1960 (going from treating kids like miniature adults to considering children as small angels to keeping children to rigorous time schedules even as babies and then Dr. Spock says "For heaven's sake, cuddle and love them!") switched back and forth so quickly that you were liable to get whiplash.
Illuminating and infuriating, but be prepared for much quotation from medical texts.
31 March 2023
Books Completed Since March 1
28 February 2023
Books Completed Since February 1
I confess, I read this doing research for a piece of fanfiction. I don't know if I got much information out of it, but it was fun to read, if I thought the anecdotes were overlong, but Greenside inadvertently gave me the title I needed for the story.
Basically it's a fish-out-of-water story of what happens when Greenside decides to spend part of each year in Brittany. He loves the French lifestyle eventually, but has to navigate around different traffic regulations—his story about getting into his first accident in France is rather jaw-dropping—getting permits, renting a car for the part of the year he's in France, getting repairmen to work at his house, etc. Luckily he has some very patient French friends who help him, since the French legal system is legendary for its strictness and complicated procedures (how true that is I don't know, but I have read this in more than one book).
If you've always wanted to live in France but wanted to check out the pitfalls, you might want to read this book if just for some chuckles.
This is a book best found half price or on remainder, but if you've been, like me, a Crayola junkie since childhood, it's a delight. It contains the history of the Binney & Smith (now Crayola, LLC) company, who made a product now known around the world (they also created the first dustless chalk). The majority of the book is a history of the current and some of the past colors, and trivia about the older colors ("flesh," of course, became "peach" in the 1970s when some kind souls pointed out that not everyone had pale skin, and "cadet blue" was first called "Prussian blue" but was finally changed because kids didn't know where Prussia (part of Germany) was any longer, etc.).
Of interest are old full-page Crayola advertisements and projects done with Crayola crayons by professional artists. Color junkies, rejoice!
This looked like a mystery story so I picked it up. And I have to say Perry writes a compelling tale with complex characters. But it's not really a mystery story, it's a psychological one set in 1893 England. There is an old legend on the Essex coast that a monster exists in the shadows, and suddenly dead bodies begin to turn up on the shore. Cora Seaborne, a widow with an intense interest in the growing science of paleontology, believes the "monster" may be a prehistoric life form that still survives, so she arrives at the seaside in the company of her overprotective maid Martha and autistic son Francis to check out the rumors. There she's introduced to William Ransome, the local vicar, and his vivacious wife and their lively children. Ransome insists there's no "serpent" or "monster," and hates that his parishioners believe in the old tales, but a few dead bodies on the shore and a mysterious sound put the whole small town on edge. This turns villager against villager until the mystery of the sound is finally revealed. Ransome and Seaborne have a romantic moment, and at the close of the book it looks like she's about to insinuate her way into his life the way she insinuated herself into the life of a talented surgeon—and then basically forgets him—during the story.
That's all that I took away from the story. There's also a do-gooder rich couple who help the poor, and a medical friend of the talented surgeon who sticks with him through his most difficult hours, and Martha hooks up with a radical protestor. I kept reading because the prose was excellent, but the fact that basically "they discover that ________ is the source of the sound and everything else was just people's imaginations and so we see what rumor and paranoia do to a formerly close-knit community" was rather a letdown.
This is the first in a planned series of mysteries written by the multi-talented Holmes, who has done two previous books, a television series called Remember WENN, Tony- and Edgar-award winning plays like The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Accomplice, and much, much more—but of course he's best known for his bestselling late 70s-early 80s rock song "Escape" (known to most people as "the Pina Colada song").
Think of the McMasters school as Hogwarts for homicide. That's the hook in this delightfully diabolical, tongue-in-cheek novel in which people attend a university to learn how to commit the perfect homicide; the twist is that the person must really need killing and there is no other way to keep them from continuing to ruin other people's lives. You follow our main protagonist Cliff Iverson, the young Englishwoman Gemma Lindley, and Hollywood actress Doria May as they seek to rid the world of an overbearing employer who caused the deaths of two of Cliff's friends, a woman who's building her career by blackmailing Gemma, and the Howard Weinstein-like monster movie producer who holds Doria in servitude for turning him down. Half the story follows their training on the "god only knows where" McMasters campus (which reminds you more than a little of "the Village" in The Prisoner television series, which is no accident), and then they're let free to pursue their final exam: killing their bete noires. Filled with more twists than a Six Flags roller coaster, more clever quips than Bob Hope's stable of writers could manage, and more double crosses than a game of tic-tac-toe, it's a wild ride full of unexpected turns, incredible training sequences, and a big dollop of sly humor, with all sorts of references hidden in the text.
Rupert's almost finished with the second volume, Murder Your Mate, and I can hardly wait to see what he comes up with. But first, a re-read...!
I'm a Madeleine L'Engle completist, which means I had to get a copy of this charming children's picture book that simply tells the story of how L'Engle as a child began to write and dream and eventually published both adult and young adult books, but finally came to fame for writing the now immortal A Wrinkle in Time. The artwork is lovely as well. I have Voiklis' children's biography of her grandmother and wish someone would do an adult version!
In the newest of the graphic novels taking place in Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" universe, Beverley Brook's sisters Olympia and Chelsea, goddesses in their own right, are attending a gathering in the woods when they remove an invisibility charm from a mulberry tree growing there. Unfortunately it frees the angry spirit of a Victorian fairy-tale illustrator named Jeter Day. The next thing they know, Day's spirit is invading people and forcing them to re-enact fairy tales. With the aid of Abigail Kamara and her friends the talking foxes, the pair must rectify this error without letting Thomas Nightingale or his apprentice Peter Grant know what happened.
This is a fanciful, if lesser effort in the "Rivers" series. The story is a little slight and frankly Olympia and Chelsea are not that compelling as main characters. Abigail also seems drawn a bit older than she is and it throws the story off a little. Still, another peek into Aaronovitch's magical world until the next real book comes out.
I knew this was the book for me from the blurb: "In this striking blend of travel writing, history and mythology, Gavin Francis offers a unique portrait of the northern outposts of Europe." And boy, what a book—I thoroughly enjoyed Francis' journey.
He begins in the Shetland Islands, following the stories of the earliest explorers who went north looking for "Ultima Thule," including St. Brendan. He then continues to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and finally Lapland, telling each region's myths and history, along with a portrait of the people who live there (most of whom long for warmth, but grow homesick and return) and the natural features and native birds and animals. He explores the areas mostly by hiking, but also takes the rare aircraft and travels by ship as well. His writing is beautiful, not flowery but very evocative and descriptive; it's a pleasure to read and certain descriptions, especially of the tough inhabitants who remain living there, stick in your mind long after you're done reading that portion. If you dream of cold weather and Arctic exploration, this is definitely the book for you!
The fifth in Collins' series based on the original CSI series. Once again, the team is working two cases: Rebecca Bennett insists her mother's death was probably foul play on the part of her stepfather, and she convinces the sheriff's department to dig the body up for an autopsy. But when Grissom, Sidle, and Stokes open the casket, a different body is contained in it instead. In the meantime, Catherine and Warrick are summoned to an eldercare facility, where their own assistant coroner, David, feels there's something suspicious about the death of Vivian Elliot, a woman who was recovering quite rapidly from surgery until she was found dead; they also discover from the head of the facility that more deaths of elderly women seem to be occurring than usual.
Collins has the characters down pat—you can hear Petersen in Grissom's dialog, Fox in Sara's, etc.; you could practically convert each of his CSI books into a television movie. And as always, the two cases have a connection to each other, but Collins works it so skillfully that you don't expect it until it happens, and the getting there is suitably complicated. CSI fans should enjoy, and they work well as a forensics mystery as well.
January Andrews writes bestselling romance novels, but after her father dies and she learns a terrible family secret, she doesn't believe she can write another "happily ever after" tale again. She retreats to the family lake cottage in order to clean and sell it, only to discover that renting the cottage next door is Augustus Everett, her old college rival, who writes deep, meaningful novels, the kind that make the bestseller lists. Turns out Gus is also suffering from writer's block, and once they begin talking to each other, thanks to the local bookclub, they come to an agreement: Gus will spend the summer writing something with a happy ending and January will write a serious novel, and each will teach the other about the successful ingredients of their craft (so January will take him to fluffy rom-com settings and Gus'll take her on his interviews with a cult member).
This book did make me cry. There are themes of betrayal and secrecy woven through the tale, so it's more than your usual fluffy rom-com stuff. The relationship builds naturally and the supporting characters (even a couple of less savory ones) are realistic. I enjoyed this one.
This is the third of Baldwin's nonfiction books which cover a year in her life, but, rather than only discussing the seasons and her home, she talks about issues of faith, belief, and love. While I don't find these as compelling as Taber's "Stillmeadow" books, they contain much food for thought about relationships, positivity, and the folly of negative thinking.
After reading Gulp, I wanted to investigate more of Roach's science books. Once again she writes with a light touch while imparting loads of information.
This book is, if you hadn't guessed from the title, is about sexuality, and each chapter focuses on a different study of human sexuality, from impotence ("ED") remedies to analysis of orgasm to the role of the clitoris in sex, all the way to an absurd chapter about how pleasurable sex among pigs produces more piglets. There's an examination of the early research of Alfred Kinsey as well as the later work of Masters and Johnson, how early treatments for "hysteria" were just doctors diddling their patients, and a doctor who reconstructs penises.
Roach has a nice, easygoing way of approaching science topics, People who like their science texts completely serious should avoid, however.
This is actually one of the better of the "Dear America" books devoted to male historical characters. Brian Doyle has run away to sea to make life easier for his older but sickly brother Sean Michael; their hard-working father often comes home drunk and Brian argues with him instead of keeping silent, so he leaves to give his brother peace. He signs on the whale ship "Florence" and is thrown bodily into shipboard life. Onboard he meets all sorts of people, from York the profane one and Nathaniel, who is devoted to his Bible. The captain has very bad luck in locating whales in warm Hawai'ian waters (this takes place in 1874, when whales were starting to be overfished), so they head north into the Arctic, only to be caught in the winter ice.
The story is grim and uncompromising, but never reaches the level of despair that proliferates when Barry Denenberg writes one of these books. Instead it is realistic in that even in despair it retains some small bit of hope. Recommended with the usual warnings about mature (death, etc.) subjects.
31 January 2023
Books Completed Since January 1
This is Vérant's sequel to Seven Letters from Paris, about how she eased into life with her new French family: her husband Jean-Luc and his two children, teenage Elvire and ten-year-old Max. They're no sooner back at Jean-Luc's home in France than they discover the house full of fleas from the Bengal cat Samantha bought as a gift for the kids. Soon Samantha has to make friends with her new stepchildren, learn to get along with her French neighbors and in her French neighborhood, learn to cook something everyone will love, and make some friends (she eventually forms a group of women who married French men). Her ingredients for making this work? Communication, friendship, adventure, passion, and love.
I enjoyed this more than the original book, which was full of annoying references to designer clothing, as Sam learns to integrate into her new life in France. Sometimes it's quite funny, and a few times very touching.
I was so happy to see another Tiger and Del book after ten years that I pre-ordered it the moment I saw it. I bought Sword-Dancer simply due to the arresting cover and immediately got sucked into the world of the Sandtiger, former slave and now expert sword-dancer, and his counterpart, Del (Delilah) from the north, who became a sword-singer (the northern discipline). Tiger starts out feeling very superior because he's a man, but Del soon puts him in his place; later they become traveling partners, then lovers, then have a child together.
The current story takes place six weeks after the previous book ended, in which Tiger has absorbed the content of a magical book in order that no one else can use it for evil. The pair is raising a lively two-year-old, Sula, plus training Neesha, the adult son Tiger just learned he had, to be a sword-dancer at their training school for the discipline. But Tiger's hidden magic has come to the attention of someone, and now freak weather conditions are striking their home, destroying the nearby town and eventually killing people; to stop the magically-summoned storms they'll have to follow where Tiger's instincts tell them to go. Their odyssey will take them through storms and strange land, including back to Del's old home where the fate of her daughter may hang in the balance.
There's a neat twist at the end of this that makes up for being a bit ambling in the middle. And Roberson says she's thinking of more adventures for them. Yes!
After finding Swift's When Wanderers Cease to Roam with her lovely watercolor illos at the book sale last spring, I felt I had to hunt up a decent but inexpensive copy of her book about her honeymoon in France—and it seemed doubly needful since I was in the middle of writing a story that took place in Paris.
This is the story of Vivian and James' honeymoon trip, illustrated with Swift's wonderful watercolor drawings alà Susan Branch, starting with Swift's first trip to France in 1975 and her packing advice, then chronicling life on the road from Paris to Normandy to Brittany to Bordeaux to the Loire Valley to Chartres and finally back to Paris, illos of food, fashions, windows, doors, and most of all the houses and the countryside. If you love watercolors, at like Susan Branch's, and/or France, you will adore this book.
Ah, more romantic fluff from Hazelwood, author of The Love Hypothesis and Love on the Brain. Mara, Sadie, and Hannah have been friends since graduate school, even after they go on to their respective scientific professions. In these three novellas collected into one volume, Mara goes to Washington DC to start a job with the EPA and claim the home left to her by her graduate school mentor, except her mentor didn't tell her that half the house was also the property of her nephew Liam, a lawyer for Big Oil; Sadie, an engineer with a green building firm, meets and likes Erik Nowak, a handsome dude who gave up a special croissant for her—until she thinks he's betrayed her, when she decides she will stay far away from him, but they end up trapped in an elevator together; and Hannah, a reluctant student who nevertheless became fascinated with space science and now wants to design exploration vessels for Mars missions. But Ian Floyd (Mara's cousin) seems to be throwing obstacles in her way, and when she goes behind her back to take a research mission to Svalbard, it seems she's come into dangerous waters.
Romantic fluff with science overtones. Some nice smut scenes, but do all of Hazelwood's heroes say nothing but "f*ck" while having sex? And biting your hand to stifle screams during orgasms? Sounds painful.
I usually love nature books, and I love most of this one, but I had some problems with the chapters she wrote from Fox's point of view. For that reason, it took me ages to finish (2 years), spending most of its time waiting for me to pick it up again.
Raven grew up with a neglectful parent who told her right out at age 12 that he couldn't wait for her to leave home. She did so at age 15. Despite this horrible start in life, Raven found work with the National Park Service and eventually gained a PhD in biology, and made a home for herself in the wilderness where she was happiest. One day a fox began appearing on her property at the same time every day. While observing her visitor, Raven and the fox became friends—not that she fed or tried to make a pet of it; instead she tried to imitate his behaviors. And she read to him.
Raven's narrative is best when she's describing her work, nature around her, etc. The parts where she sees herself, the magpies that hang around her cabin, and the territory around her cabin through the fox's eyes come off, to me, as a little "cute," although not "cutesy." I just didn't think it worked well. YMMV. The book is still well worth reading from the nature angle.
I've read all the Vanderbeekers books, but this one by far is the best, although I was wondering at the beginning what was going to happen.
It's Papa Vanderbeeker's 40th birthday and the kids (twins Isa and Jessie, Oliver, Hyacinth, and Laney) are ready to party. Before the party Papa and Oliver will be going camping together. Then Papa's best friend in the Midwest loses his mother and Papa must miss the camping trip to help his friend. Oliver's understandably bitter, until Mama's parents arrive and the kids band together against Grandma's constant criticism. Besides, they are planning a great birthday gift: they discovered Papa never went on the college graduation trip planned by his father, known as Pop-Pop, so they're going to find the place he was supposed to go and take him there.
What follows is a chaotic, sometimes sobering, and ultimately heartwarming story as the kids find out more about their paternal grandfather, but also about mysteriously silent Grandpa and grumpy Grandma. There's joy in a subway ride, a bicycle excursion across the Brooklyn Bridge, Oliver and Laney trying to dye their cat to prove they should dye their hair, the discovery of clues in the search for Pop-Pop's past, but mainly in the revelations eventually revealed by their maternal grandparents, which may make you cry. It did me!
Oh, and we finally find out Papa's name, Derek! Have they ever mentioned Mama's name?
Grace Thomas, who loves to bake like her grandparents who own a bakery, is hoping to earn money during the summer with her two best friends. Then her mom is summoned to Paris to help her pregnant sister who married a French baker and takes Grace with her. Can Grace get along with her cousin Sylvie, who misses her late mother, learn French, help out in her uncle's bakery, and maybe, just maybe, adopt the cute stray French bulldog who's hanging around the bakery?
I grabbed this book basically because I'm writing a story that takes place in France and it looked like it would be a reference to everyday life in France. The phrase book at the end was quite helpful and reminded me that my characters would not get bread and pastries in the same store like they would in Italian bakeries in the U.S. The American Girl "Girl of the Year" stories are okay. I like the historicals better. Looking forward to Claudie Wells!
10 January 2023
A Baker's Dozen of Favorite Books of 2023
Gulp, Mary Roach (informative and funny study of taste, digestion, and elimination)
Honorable Mentions:
31 December 2022
Books Completed Since December 1
The Usual Santas: A Collection of Soho Crime Christmas Capers, from Soho Press A Nottinghamshire Christmas, compiled by John Hudson Llewellyn's Little Book of Yule, Jason Mankey The Matzah Ball, Jen Meltzer God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen, Rhys Bowen A Somerset Christmas, compiled by John Chandler The Magic of Christmas, edited by Amy Neumark Re-read: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens A Suffolk Christmas, compiled by Humphrey Phelps Ideals Christmas 2022, editors of "Ideals"