Recent Reads: At First Spite

Recent Reads: AT FIRST SPITE: a complete delight This is a romance I preordered because how could you resist that title, even if you DON’T know the main character ends up living in a spite house (a tiny, tiny house built between other properties, practically unlivable but built out of, you know, spite) between her ex’s house, and, as it turns out, her ex’s horrible older brother’s house? Which you do know, because the back of the book tells you so, so I’m not spoiling anything. :) The heroine, Athena,…

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Recent Reads: The Dark is Rising

I have read THE DARK IS RISING many, many times in my life, far more than I can count (I mean, it’s probably a countable number, but it’s not like I have been counting!). It is, perhaps, not quite my favorite of the sequence (I have a soft spot for GREENWITCH, which was the first of them I read, and which features Jane quite heavily, which, I mean, like, y’know, female protagonist, so…), but I’m fairly willing to concede it’s the best of the series, arguably by a long shot.…

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Recent Reads: Starbridge

Recent Reads: Starbridge, AC Crispin (amazon affiliate) This is one of my favorite books. It’s a first contact story, led by a teenage girl, and I was the same age as the protagonist when I first read it, which probably helped cement its place near and dear to my heart. :) Mahree Burroughs (I only noticed the nod to Edgar Rice there in this reading!) is a human from an Earth colony, on her way to Earth for the first time to go to college. Their ship, captained by her…

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Recent Reads: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

This is one of many books I’ve bought because someone on Twitter (in this case, fantasy novelist Stephanie Burgis) recommended it. For a platform notorious for Not Selling Books, I gotta say, I’ve bought an awful lot of books because of it. RIP Twitter. Anyway. IRREGULAR WITCHES is a contemporary rrrrromantic fantasy, I guess, because there is a romance storyline of some importance, but it’s really about Found Family, and like a lot of what I’ve been reading lately, it was a balm to my weary soul. It’s the story…

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The 1980something cover of THE WESTING GAME, featuring chess pieces on a puzzle with missing sections, beneath one of which is Uncle Sam in a casket.

Recent Reads: The Westing Game

I first read Ellen Raskin’s THE WESTING GAME (affiliate link) when I was about eleven. It was the first, and I believe remains the only, book that I have ever finished reading, stared at a moment, and then gone back to the beginning to read again immediately. I then read it again many, many times in my tween and early teen years, but I don’t remember re-reading it for…well, a very long time. But it came up again recently, possibly in context of Ellen Raskin as a cover designer, and…

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