It’s 1915, and Bess Heath is a happy, well-to-do student at Loretto Academy, a Catholic school on a bluff in Niagara Falls, Canada. Her window looks out toward the falls, and she imagines that the flecks of silver she sees in the mist are prayers. When her father loses his job at the Niagara Power Company, [...]
Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category
The Day the Falls Stood Still
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Writing Class
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on November 25, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In Jincy Willett’s 2008 novel, Amy Gallup teaches an extension class on writing fiction. She was once a writer herself: her first novel was published when she was only twenty-two, and she wrote a couple of decent novels after that. But when her husband died, her motivation died with him, and now she makes a [...]
The English Major
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction on November 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
My book club, like a lot of all-female book clubs, tends to mostly read books by and about women. If we read a book by or about men, it’s usually either a classic like On the Road or a nonfiction book about a topic of interest like Into the Wild. One of the women in [...]
Citizen of the Galaxy
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction, Speculative Fiction on November 23, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’ll never forget the first time I took a real book suggestion from my father. I was about twelve or thirteen, and he gave me Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel. At the time, I’d never really read any science fiction — my taste tended more to fantasy and endless re-readings of Rebecca. I [...]
Sharp Teeth
Posted in Fiction, Speculative Fiction on November 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Imagine that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been written by Homer. Or, no, wait, that’s not quite right. Imagine that Walt Whitman had been brought up on MTV and Frank Miller and B-movies and amphetamines, and that he decided to write a novel about werewolves. It is just possible that it might turn out something like [...]
What the Dead Know (take two)
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries on November 17, 2009 | 11 Comments »
The very first book I ever reviewed for this blog was Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know. I really, really didn’t like it. In fact, I disliked it so much that I abandoned it. Imagine starting a blog that way! But I had started Shelf Love to talk about the books I was reading, and [...]
Northanger Abbey (reread)
Posted in Classics, Fiction on November 16, 2009 | 15 Comments »
What’s hidden in that locked trunk? What’s lurking in that closet? Who’s imprisoned in those closed-off rooms? That’s what Catherine Morland wants to know when she visits Northanger Abbey in Jane Austen’s novel of the same name. I first read this novel as part of a class on Gothic novels in college, so most of [...]
Armadale
Posted in Classics, Fiction on November 13, 2009 | 19 Comments »
Have you been noticing a lot of chatter about Wilkie Collins around the blogosphere lately? If so, you’ve probably stumbled across the Classics Circuit, a blog tour program that seeks to encourage the reading of classic literature. Every weekday from November 2 to December 11, a different book blog is featuring Wilkie Collins. (See the schedule here.) [...]
Saffy’s Angel
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Fiction on November 12, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Children’s books fall, for me, into one of several categories. First, there are the ones where magical children do magical things. These include the Harry Potter series, The Dark is Rising, and the His Dark Materials trilogy: children with special powers using them to special effect. Then you have ordinary children doing magical things. This [...]
How to Buy a Love of Reading
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 11, 2009 | 9 Comments »
The handful of review copies that I’ve reviewed on this blog are copies that I’ve requested, usually through Library Thing’s Early Reviewers program or through ads in the Shelf Awareness e-newsletter. I haven’t received many requests from authors or publishers, and the few I’ve received haven’t really appealed to me. Tanya Egan Gibson’s request was [...]
