![]() ![]() There, Zoe must summon all her ghostly abilities to protect her mother-child from tragedy. The luminescent language and harrowing plot of loss and retrieval swirls Zoe from summer camp back through time to her mother's childhood in an island home. I was like a little paper umbrella twirling."" Her ""ghostwalking"" frightens her, but she is compelled to use her power to solve a mystery in her estranged mother's past. Fourteen-year-old Zoe can actually do it: ""Without moving I turned around inside my body, fully, again and again. ![]() Many teens know the feeling of being captive in their bodies, wanting to burst out and fly away to fix things that went wrong a long time ago. This glowing story of a girl who leaves her body and travels back through time to save her mother is a worthy sequel to the Edgar Allan Poe Award winner Stonewords. ![]()
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![]() ![]() While there are lots of questions left to be answered, the cliff-hanger ending promises more installments. His aliens are delightfully bizarre, and plucky Red, whose determination is admirable, if occasionally grating to her compatriots, showcases a lively range of emotion. James Mayhew's Miranda the Castaway (1996) Mary Casanova's When Eagles Fall (2002) Terry Pratchett's Nation (2008) Eddie Pittman's Red's Planet (2016). Pittman, who made a name for himself as an animator for Disney, brings a similar visual style, humor, and pacing to this story, as well as a nicely articulated sense of movement and action. Now, not only is Red far from home, she is totally stranded with a bunch of weird creatures who can’t seem to get along and one grouchy lion in a Hawaiian shirt who could help but really doesn’t want to. While traipsing out of town, Red is abducted by a pair of collectibles-loving aliens to their museum ship, but a surprise attack leads to a crash landing on a deserted planet. That, coupled with powerful wanderlust and fierce independence, means that Red is going to strike out on her own-way out. At her foster home, Red-one of seven kids-never quite gets enough. ![]() ![]() And as mentioned, Radiance and honestly anything like Grace Draven’s other work is pretty much guaranteed to be just my cup of tea. Shapeshifters, aliens, fae, merfolk, goblin kings, and more, all of them are fair game. ![]() I’m open to pretty much any kind of “not human” - Ruby Dixon’s Fireblood Dragons are able to shift between a humanoid form and a dragon form but have a distinctly alien culture which I really enjoy, which is more of what I’m looking for than, for example, Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changelings. I’m hoping for recommendations for some romance audiobooks with non-human romance interests! What can I say, reading Radiance by Grace Draven around the same time that I watched Shape of Water opened my eyes to my love of monster husbands. ![]() ![]() ![]() Strands of Bronze and Gold is now available in bookstores, online and at your local library!ĪW: What drew you to the “Bluebeard” fairy tale? What was it like turning a very short (and extremely creepy!) tale into a lush and fully-developed novel? Today, we’re happy to welcome Jane and her editor, Allison Wortche, to the blog to share more about the book, Jane’s inspiration, the editorial process, and what’s next from this exciting new author! We hope you enjoy this special editor’s corner. This will appeal to older teens and to adults who enjoy well-written, Gothic romance. ![]() As she gets to know Cressac better, she starts to uncover the truth about his wives, all missing or dead, all crimson-haired like herself. But her benefactor’s dark moods scare her, and the plantation feels full of history and ghosts. She is soon seduced by her new life of luxury, full of gorgeous clothes, rich food and staff to wait on her hand and foot. Sophia is a red-headed beauty, and an orphan taken in by her mysterious godfather Monsieur Bernard de Cressac. ![]() A re-telling of the Bluebeard fairy tale, set in the pre-Civil War south on a lush plantation, it’s a quick, juicy novel I couldn’t put down. This exciting debut from young adult author Jane Nickerson is full of romance, mystery, and danger. ![]() In a mini-review of debut young adult novel Strands of Bronze and Gold by Jane Nickerson we shared earlier this week, Erin said: ![]() ![]() ![]() But will Patty, who's still desperate for Ethan's true love, be satisfied with what amounts to a compromise solution? Berg is facile in transforming familiar elements into apt metaphors, and her smooth transitions between tragedies and joys are punctuated with lively humor. Ethan wants children, too, and eventually Patty talks him into having a baby with her. The biggest barrier between Patty and her version of happily-ever-after is that Ethan, the man she's in love with, is not only her ex-fianc e and lifelong best friend, but also gay. She worries about the ticking of her biological clock-and how to ""keep her eggs healthy""-and although ""it's been a long time since I've been kissed by anyone but family members,"" she tries to stay optimistic. ![]() Sparkling and witty, this novel stars self-conscious dreamer Patty Murphy, a single, 36-year-old Massachusetts realtor who seesaws from hope to despair between blind dates and manicure appointments. ![]() Leave it to Berg (What We Keep) to put a quirky, melancholic spin on the familiar story of an ordinary woman's quest for marriage and children. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Wasp Factory was not supposed to be shocking, yet was found so. It was supposed to be funny.īanks offered readers his “anti-body” theory of critical response. The author laid no claim to Saki allusions, but was pleased to have his book thought of as a “black comedy”. She even managed to detect Banks in an inadvertent quotation of a shard of dialogue from this Edwardian master of the domestic grotesque. She compared it - with rather convincing chapter and verse - to the cruelly amusing fiction of Saki. One - who declared “I’ve been a Banksian for the last quarter of a century” (“Banksian” was a noun with which the novelist himself was unfamiliar) - argued that, far from being horrifying, it was “very, very funny”. Several of the readers who came to hear the author discuss his novel at the Guardian Book Club last week mocked this response. How shocking is The Wasp Factory? The current paperback edition carries extracts from some original reviews that described it as (in the words of the Sunday Express) “the literary equivalent of a video nasty”. ![]() ![]() It was an unsolved murder and we walked through the different parts of the legation quarter that were relevant in the investigation. It is amazing that nearly all the same places still exist to this day, so it really feels like going back in time. It was interesting to hear about the murder and go back in time to see what life was like in that time. “Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China” the true story of the murder of a young British woman in Peking in January 1937, written by Paul French Lars from Beijing Postcards Denmark was the tour guide. We did a walking tour following the scenes of midnight in Peking with Bespoke travel company. British and Russian are now big government buildings. ![]() We visited the Belgian legation which is one of the only surviving parts and had afternoon tea. ![]() I recently did a tour of the legation quarter. ![]() ![]() The Titanic, her stern standing high out of the water, was sliding into the sea. Or the great crystal chandeliers thundering down on parquet floors. It shook, and there were explosions deep within it. Over the chorus of hundreds of far-off voices crying out, I heard music again, a mournful, stately melody now that broke as I listened, notes scattered to the wind. The ship shuddered and the hiss of steam ceased. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and the Medallion from the University of Southern Mississippi. In addition, he has won a number of major honors for the body of his work, including the Margaret A. He is a Newbery Medal winner (for A Year Down Yonder), a Newbery Honor winner (for A Long Way from Chicago), a two-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Edgar Award winner. Peck is the first children’s book author to have received a National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York City, and spends a great deal of time traveling around the country to speaking engagements at conferences, schools, and libraries. ![]() ![]() In fact The Washington Post called him America’s best living author for young adults.” A versatile writer, he is beloved by middle-graders as well as young adults for his historical and contemporary comedies and coming-of-age novels. Richard Peck has written more than thirty novels, and in the process has become one of the country’s most highly respected writers for children. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Like, do you think that society is too dependent on technology. And, you know, AI is advancing so quickly. RASCOE: One of your stories also deals with, like, robots and artificial intelligence, which everyone is talking about these days. ![]() And I hope that adds some fresh elements to the familiar structure. And I add a Korean reality, the things that I see or the things that I heard from somebody else and wed that kind of magical twist to it. And I really love that structure, so I try to use it whenever it seems fun. ![]() So you've described these stories as, quote, "like a fairy tale but with a little bit of a Korean twist." Can you talk about what that means? They definitely felt like fairy tales to me.ĬHUNG: Fairy tales - usually, the European ones that we are kind of used to in the English-speaking world has a certain way of plot development. Author Bora Chung joins us now to talk about her collection. It was translated from Korean by Anton Hur. Those are some of the bizarre, twisted plot lines in "Cursed Bunny," Bora Chung's first collection of short stories to appear in English, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. A girl whose brother feeds on her blood, robots that take revenge on their owner and a bunny lamp with a deadly curse. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() From a distance, I’d first thought her a younger woman, but when she was closer I could see the deep etches around her mouth, and also a kind of angry exhaustion in her eyes. The Mother by this time was standing right behind Josie …. Klara feels a pang of tenderness as she watches the two of them. Klara’s life changes in more ways than one when a middle-aged woman purchases her for Josie, her thin, chronically ill daughter. As the novel opens, she’s on sale in the window of an AF shop, where her almost-human traits are cultivated by the kindly Manager. ![]() The eponymous Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF, designed to attend to the needs of teenagers a confidante-handmaiden hybrid. Teenagers slurp yogurt while playing with laptop-like devices called “oblongs ” flocks of “machine birds” fly around outside, not quite visible from the “Open Plan” living rooms indoors. As with Blade Runner, the novel is set in the near future, but with familiar details. Ishiguro poses the question of what it means to be fully human. Ridley Scott’s stylish and unnerving Blade Runner was about synthetic humans known as “replicants.” In Klara and the Sun-the first novel he’s published since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017-Kazuo Ishiguro does Scott one better with a replicant narrator straddling the line between her human and mannequin selves, dependent on the “nourishing” of an anthropomorphized Sun. ![]() |