Angieville

Yesterday, Diana Peterfreund linked to a Barnes & Noble blog post highlighting their favorite Jane Austen updates, retellings, adaptations, what have you. Happily, Peterfreund's own For Darkness Shows the Stars was on the list. It set me to thinking about my own favorite Austen reducia. Interestingly, I seem to struggle with Austen updates in book form. I'm not exactly sure why that is. There are an intimidatingly large quantity of them out there, and I know many of them are quite popular. Of those I have read, I notice I tend to fare better with the ones that feature large changes, such as setting them in a fantasy or post-apocalyptic world or removing them so much from their original story lines that it's more an "inspired by" sort of thing than a true dedicated retelling. After scouring my mind, I came up with the following short list of favorites: Novels Enthusiasm by Polly Shulman - a short and sweet contemporary YA loosely connected to  Pride ...

I figured I might as well go ahead and write this review while my stomach is still all twisted and jumpy from finishing it last night and being unable to settle down for hours afterward. Truthfully? I was so caught up I had to go pull my copy of The Raven Boys down off the shelf and reread my favorite bits to help me come down off the high of the second book. Honestly. I'm as bad as Ronan coming out of one of his dreams. Only I don't have a Gansey or a Noah to help harness me back to reality. So. You all will be my Gansey and my Noah, yes? Because I need you after the whirling dervish that was this book had its way with my emotions. It's not that I don't know what I'm getting into when I immerse myself in Maggie's latest book. It's that I'm utterly unable (and entirely uninterested) in distancing myself from these boys and this girl I love. And so when the gloves inevitably come off and the humor eases deceptively into anguish, I am left huddled in a ...

It's trailerlicious around these parts. So another Romeo & Juliet adaptation, yes. But this one has Damian Lewis as Lord Capulet and Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence, so I am very much going to be seeing it. Is it just me or is the actor who plays Romeo really sort of channeling Leonard Whiting from the Zeffirelli version? Not a bad thing, my friends. Not a bad thing at all. Due out October 13th, will you be seeing it?

I'm a bit behind due to jet lag and other post-vacation woes, but I definitely wanted to mention the Old School Middle Grade Roundtable I participated in last week over @ the Book Smugglers . Ana and Thea took one of their weekly Old School Wednesdays (happily inspired by our very own Retro Fridays ) and made it a special edition post, inviting five bloggers to sit down and discuss their top five old school middle grade books. I was there, along with Heidi @ Bunbury in the Stacks , Charlotte @ Charlotte's Library , Liz @ A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy , and Ana @ Things Mean a Lot . So basically the stellarest of stellar company. As Liz points out, no titles overlap! Which was completely unplanned and which makes the whole thing sort of that much more awesome. I went with two historicals, two contemporaries, and one high fantasy. Stop in and see which ones I chose and check out the whole fabulous list .

OMG PIPER