Lilian Jackson Braun
From the first Cat Who… book, I jumped to one of the more recent, as I’d lost track of the series several years ago, and felt the need to catch up. Qwilleran and the cats (KoKo aquired a female partner a few books into the series) are in the tiny town of Pickax now, and the characters woven through this story are mostly old friends.
It involves a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest, bananas, bookstores, and real estate.
Enough said.
Lilian Jackson Braun
I read this book years ago – decades even – when my mother still lived in the US, and we used to hit the library together every weekend, sometimes with my grandmother, sometimes not, and take home as many books as we could carry. Together, we worked through all of this series, as well as many others.
In any case, this book was originally published in 1966, but it manages to hold up pretty well, considering, and it’s the first in a long series of cozy mysteries about reporter Jim Qwilleran and his crime-solving Siamese cat KoKo.
These books aren’t intellectual in the slightest, but they’re full of great characters, gastronomic and architectural delights, and mild mysteries that are completely lacking in horror and gore.
Perfect for afternoon tea.
Or for sharing with your mother.
Danielle Steel
I’m embarrassed to admit that I read this. In my own defense, it came as a book club selection I forgot to cancel, and since it was here, I read it. The story, that of a widower and a widow connecting with the help of their handyman, is pretty formulaic, and the characters are extremely two-dimensional, but I really liked the descriptions of the houses and the main character’s yacht.
This is the sort of book one only reads when locked in a bathroom or hospital waiting room, with no other reading material.
Jacqueline Carey
I don’t remember who recommended the Kushiel books to me in the first place, only that I resisted reading them for the longest time, then, when I did, sheepishly admitted that I liked them.
In any case, I bought this, the final book in the Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy, several months ago, but only read it very recently, when I was between trips to the library. I liked it well enough, I guess, but I hate to see series end, even though the ending in this case was a natural one, as the story arc was not only complete, but all the loose ends had been tied up.
Gillian Stokes
My friend Sky sent me this beautiful little book, and it’s quickly become a personal treasure. It’s not the sort of thing I’d ever have picked up on my own (I’d have looked at it, been intrigued, and then moved on to the fiction section), but as a gift, I appreciate it immensely.
While the text is helpful, both in a common-sense advice sort of way, and as the subject of many meditations, the quotations and art are what hooked me first, and what I love about this book is that I can pick it up anywhere, re-read it, leave it for a while, and then come back, and still get something new from it.
Thank you, Sky, for sharing this treasure.
Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels
Opening very soon after the end of Star Trek: Nemesis, this novel is the first in a subseries of Pocket’s Star Trek: The Next Generation series, and is set in the first mission of the U.S.S. Titan, under the command of William T. Riker.
It includes a mix of characters from TNG, DS9 and Voyager, as well as some familiar faces from the A Time To… series, and was surprisingly interesting, though it was difficult to read a novel with TNG characters that didn’t include Picard or Data.
Definitely worth reading.
Lynne Truss
Much fuss was made about this book a couple of years ago when it was freshly printed. It’s billed as a “zero tolerance approach to punctuation,” but the American version, at least, spends fully half the text discussing the apostrophe.
For a grammar book, it’s amusing, and author Truss has a readable, if sometimes snobbish, voice.
Grammar mavens should definitely check it out, but real writers are probably better off sticking with Strunk and White.
Frances Norris
Julia Daniel is a food-stylist who really wants to be a photographer, and who has recently lost her father and stepmother in a plane crash (her mother had died years before), which event spurs her to examine her life. She hates her boss, she’s not dating, and she’s unsatisfied with her career, all of which are fairly typical for fictional characters in their thirties.
But while Blue Plate Special does include the usual chick-lit standards of the perfect guy and the supportive friend, as well as the mother-surrogate from childhood friend, it strays from the genre in that the happy ending is still a bit out of reach at the end of the novel – it will come, but not instantly.
While I enjoyed the book, I’m really bored with women in books who are only happy when in a relationship, not just happy in themselves.
Louise Marley
In The Child Goddess Louise Marley introduces us to a future in which the Catholic Church, bowing to peer pressure, and the need for clergy to serve on Earth and various other worlds, has allowed an order of female priests, the Magdalenes, celebate Enquirers who have accepted Mary of Magdala as Christ’s first disciple.
Despite that, it’s not a religious novel, as much as it is a good first contact story. A power company on an obscure, mostly-oceanic world discovers an island of lost children, remnants of a 300 year old colony. There’s the inevitable skirmish, and one child is brought home to Earth, where Isabel, the Magdalene priest who is the lead character, is assigned as guardian, and with the help of a friend (which backstory, I’m hoping, is in one of the other books in this series) discovers the truth of the girl’s life and culture.
It’s an excellent novel as a stand-alone, and I enjoyed it as much for the plot as for Marley’s feminist sensibilities with regard to Catholocism.
I look forward to visiting her work again, in the future.
Joanne Fluke
Hannah Swenson owns a bakery called The Cookie Jar in a fictional town in Minnesota, and when she’s not pushing sugar, she solves crimes. The formula for a Culinary Mystery is not new: cozy murder mystery combined with a cookbook, but unlike Diane Mott Davidson’s tales, the mystery here is predictable, and the text is desperate for a good editor.
I confess that the book did inspire the need to make cobbler (mine was strawberry), and the recipe worked, for the most part, but I find it jarring to have the recipes within the chapters, and not grouped together at the end.