My kingdom for this book to have not turned into an uninspired, forced, one-sided romance! It started off so well: in the late 19th century, Ceony Twill is the top graduate from the amusingly poncily-named Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined. Like other trained magicians, after graduation, she enters an apprenticeship with a tradesman-magician who specializes in a type of materials magic. The idea is that magicians can “bond” to a material and then, basically, learn the all of the magical properties of that material […]
Growing up is a miracle
The Age of Miracles is a coming of age story against the backdrop of a celestial/environmental disaster. Rather than going into great detail about the science behind the event, the novel focuses on how the seemingly mundane aspects of life are affected by our actions when we no longer can take the stability of the world around us for granted. Goodreads summary: “On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the […]
“My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded.”
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is a whimsical mystery with a creepy underbent. It balances a scary proposition — little girls going missing in a small German town where everyone knows each other — with the idealistic naivete of its 10 year old protagonist, who understands on one level that the girls who go missing are her classmates, near and around her age, but doesn’t make the connection that she may herself be in a particular danger. It’s this dramatic irony that propels the story, […]
Awful people are fascinating people
In TV crime procedurals, the first part of the obvious formula includes the introduction of a red herring character, someone who is too obvious, and the detectives will waste a bunch of time trying to stick that person to the wall before finding a breakthrough that leads them to the actual suspect. Gillian Flynn’s version of this is that EVERYONE is obvious. All of the characters have the means and the disposition to have done it, if not the exact motive, but who needs motive when […]
“What is the world coming to, with these modern women? A man can’t tell them what to do.”
So far, I’m enjoying the ludicrously named Stud Club trilogy, but at the same time I can tell that they are earlier works from an author whose later titles, I feel, are more indicative of her talent. The second entry into the trilogy follows the VERY tortured Rhys St. Maur, Lord Ashworth, a war hero and broody dude who is a closet romantic and wants nothing more than to start over and create, rather than destroy, back at his ancestral home. His love interest is Meredith Maddox, […]
Frustrating and lovely and decidedly different.
As a very new reader to romance, the books I’ve picked up have tended to be fairly new, as in published within the last 5-10 years, and decidedly feminist or progressive in their mentality. Even if they’re not openly advocating for women’s rights or chiding the customs that disadvantage(d) women, the stories I’ve loved have mostly had a bent of “they’re awesome but overlooked because of social/cultural reasons.” Enter Flowers from the Storm, which is more than twenty years old and not un-feminist or non-progressive, but it comes […]
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