Book Review Monday – Dana Stabenow

James obtrudes bloody murder into the pleasant, ordered world of Elizabeth and Darcy

…Younger sons cannot marry where they like. …“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” –Jane Austen At the time she had wondered whether the remark had held a warning and the suspicion had caused her some embarrassment which she had attempted to hide by turning the conversation into a pleasantry. But the memory of the…

You’ll even find out what a swashbuckle is.

I’m sort of surprised I finished this book, as I am not a fan of the Earl of Essex, and I almost put it down anyway when the story opens with the hero coming off a month-long drunk. Yawn. But I persevered, and John Lawley is a fun character to follow around, in spite of…

The cowboying way of life.

I’ve been doing a considerable amount of research into life in the American West in 1890, which reminded me of these two great reads. I simply disappeared between the covers of this book. Hilarious, heart-breaking and oh so real, this isn’t just a story about a cowboy and the cowboying way of life, it’s about…

Pake Kokua (Hawaiian for, roughly, Chinese Helper, which really ought to read Saint).

I first read this book back in my teens, and I was in Hawaii recently and decided it was time to reread it. It has held up really well in the interim. Okay, Michener not the greatest master of the craft of writing, agreed, but he knows how to tell a story. Here he tells…

Fore-edge painting, swoon.

Here’s an even sneakier way of doing it. I need to go back to Trinity College, because they’ve got a lot more than the Book of Kells. And of course there’s a DIY. I am a sucker for fore-edge paintings, and I’m happy to report that publishers haven’t forgotten how. The most recent example I’ve…

She had also a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel and of reaching down the front of her dress and adjusting her large breasts.

An oldie but a very goodie. The author of the beloved Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books (amazingly still in print, hallelujah) marries and follows her husband to a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state in the 1930s. She is not a happy farmer, and she writes of everything and everyone from Stove (number one on…

The assassin, unfortunately, does not labor under such moral constraints, or any at all for that matter.

KT, a tech journalist in Seattle receives a death threat against herself and her 13-year old daughter and calls her friend and fellow journalist June Cassidy, who immediately dispatches main squeeze ex-super soldier Peter Ash to KT’s assistance, and just in the nick of time, too. He turned in a crouch and scrambled toward Ellie…

Children who grow up immersed in books develop the ability to answer their own questions

I’m just gonna quote. Children who are read to regularly from early ages develop lifelong skills that can’t be acquired from a VCR or the Disney Channel. They become better listeners and find it easier to pay attention in school. Their vocabularies grow rapidly, and grammar seems less mysterious to them. They don’t immediately lose…

Sector Center News ace reporter Presit a Tur de Valentrisy

Here endeth Tanya Huff’s Torin Kerr series (5 books beginning with Valor’s Choice and continuing with her Peacekeeper trilogy, this one are being the last one (if you’ve read the books you’ll see what I did there). I envy you if you haven’t yet read them because you’re in for a real treat—these books are…

Men have been thrown overboard just for glancing.

Ruth, Dora, Alyce and Hank, four teens in Fairbanks and Southeast Alaska in 1965, are each stumbling through the aftermath of the loss of a parent or parents through death or divorce or negligence. The story is told in their alternating viewpoints, and the thing I liked most was the wealth of detail that comes…

Dana Stabenow

Category: Book Review Monday