I Am Margaret Moore by Hannah Capin was an unexpected favorite. The story is written in a first person stream of consciousness type of narrative that can be hard for an author to pull off and hard for readers to follow. In this mystery Margaret, or Mar, is a girl who has attended a naval...
Wow. I really enjoyed A Dark and Hollow Star. A nice surprise. This is an Urban Fantasy about the Fae community in Toronto and conflicts between the Mortal and Immortal realms. One of the main characters is Nausicaä, who was one of the three Furies. "Was," because she was exiled from the Immortal realm for...
As I was listening to the first chapter of Burn the Dark by S.A. Hunt I thought "The flow is not so great and this doesn't seem that well written." Then chapter two started and I was hooked. It wasn't that chapter one was bad. Chapter one was the version as it was narrated and...
Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the story of a 17 year old art student, Karou, who lives in Prague. When she gets together with her friends they share the art they have been working on, Karou has wonderful drawings of fantastical creators in her journal that tell stories about them. They are wonderful half-animal,...
I really liked Wildlife by Fiona Wood. It is about two 16 year old girls, Sib and Lou, whose school has a "term in the woods" program. Lou is new. She just transferred in. Her boyfriend died in an accident and she is trying to cope with her grief. Lou is no-nonsense, understandably withdrawn, and...
Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough is one of the best written and best told stories that I've read in a long time. It is the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, a young painter in Rome in the early 1600s. It is a man's world and women have little say in their own lives. Artemisia's mother died when...
Sky in the Deep is an amazing, well written book based on Viking lore. It is an incredibly rich well told story about a young Aska warrior, Eelyn. The story begins on the battlefield where once again the Aska face off against their traditional enemy, the Riki. Five years previously, Eelyn lost her brother Iri in...
I was immediately hooked by The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. As an anthropologist, I had read a number of works by "armchair anthropologists" that tracked the history of science through the Victorian era, the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, the gradual unearthing of fossils that called into question a worldview based on counting...
Writing teachers tell their students to keep a journal, that by writing you learn about yourself. This book gives a twist to that age-old wisdom. First the title, every twelve years everyone in the community forgets everything. To combat the periodic forgetting, everyone carries around a book where they write about their lives so that after the forgetting...
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a collection of three stories that take place in Westeros a hundred years before the events in the Game of Thrones series, a Song of Ice and Fire. The stories are tales of a poor hedge knight, Ser Duncan (or Dunk), who tends to find himself embroiled in the...
I just finished listening to the audiobook Smoke by Dan Vyleta, read by Allan Corduner, and I must say it is one of my favorite “listens” of the year. There is nothing better than the perfect pairing of a great book and a talented narrator who can capture the essence of a story. Smoke takes...