After very much enjoying several of Philip Pullman’s other books (His Dark Materials and companion books, The Firework Maker’s Daughter and The Scarecrow and His Servant), I had high hopes for the Sally Lockhart Mysteries. In the first book, The Ruby in the Smoke, we meet Sally who, at age 16, has been recently orphaned. She is curious to know more about the circumstances of her father’s death after receiving some ambiguous information. Sally has had a very nontraditional upbringing in 1872 Victorian London, so […]
McKinley does it again
I’ve been a long-time fan of Robin McKinley, so I requested this new one through my Online Library and was excited when it became available days later. It is nice to know that the library requests can work and I wasn’t disappointed by the effort. I hadn’t even heard about Shadows and since McKinley doesn’t often do sequels, you never really know what you are going to get. Unlike many of her books, Shadows doesn’t have a fairy-tale land setting. It is more like our […]

