Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale (2017) I opened The Bear and the Nightingale with great anticipation and not a little trepidation; since the trend for fairy-tale fiction exploded some years ago, there have been some brilliant entries in the genre and some derivative duds. Katherine Arden’s debut novel looked promising, with its half-magical, […]
At the center of Witch Week this year, I wanted to place a set of books that were central to the development of American fantasy: the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. They’ve also been important in my own reading life, as you can perhaps tell from the title of my blog. I knew that […]
Peter S. Beagle, Summerlong (2016) The Puget Sound setting and mythological overtones of Peter S. Beagle’s new novel, Summerlong, made it sound irresistible to me — and it turned out to be a lovely end-of-summer read. A long-term unmarried couple, one living in Seattle and the other across the water on Gardner Island, find their […]
John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (1984) When I said I planned to read The Witches of Eastwick for the Reading New England challenge, I also said I didn’t expect to enjoy it — and I was right, I didn’t. So this is going to be one of the rare times on this blog when […]
Delia Sherman, The Evil Wizard Smallbone (2016) When a book gets compared to the work of Diana Wynne Jones, I’m not sure whether to read it or not. On the one hand, there’s the hope that the reading experience will evoke the brilliant qualities of my all-time favorite fantasy author. On the other, there’s the […]
Paris in July is an event hosted by Thyme for Tea that encourages us to enjoy and blog about all things French — books, movies, food, what have you. In a burst of synchronicity, when I learned of this event I already had not just one, but four books on my shelf to go with […]
When I was writing my review of Lucky Jim, one of the most acclaimed comic novels of all time, I looked around to see what else was included on lists of the funniest books. I found that they were heavily dominated by male writers; this one from AbeBooks, for example, was chosen by British readers […]
I’m away this week for my quarter-century (!) reunion at Carleton College, which is a literary landmark as well as a wonderful school. As regular blog readers may recall, Carleton is the model for Blackstock College in the fantasy classic Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, and I did a post on the real-life locations behind […]
Thank you to all who joined me in celebrating Elizabeth Goudge’s birthday last Sunday, April 24. Whether you read a book in her honor, posted your own review, or just enjoyed the contributions of others, I’m so glad we got to take this day to celebrate an author who has fallen out of fashion, but […]
Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree (2016) I think that Frances Hardinge is destined to become one of my new favorite authors. I loved The Lie Tree (as well as her previous novel, Cuckoo Song) for the interesting things she does with ideas and relationships and history and myth. Hardinge’s prose is vivid and distinctive without […]