This first novel in a young adult series by Maggie Stiefvater creates one of my favorite main character names to date—Blue Sargent.  Blue is the only non-psychic in a family of female clairvoyants, living in a small town.  Though she seems to be “normal,” Blue amplifies the powers of those around her and so every year her mother takes her to an old church where they watch for the “soon to be dead” to walk by.  Year after year, Blue never sees them until the […]

So this Scottish lady Marion Chesney wrote a whole bunch of books – mysteries, romances, what have you, using a bunch of pseudonyms. As M. C. Beaton, she wrote the Poor Relations series, which I guess can be classified as Regency romance/comedy of manners. I’ll review all six of them here, because there’s a through line that carries the entire series, plus the plot of each book follows pretty much the same formula and there’s no sense in writing the same thing six times with […]