Angieville

I've been sitting on a review of The Song of Achilles for some time now. And it's simply another case of me worrying I won't do justice not just to the book, but to (perhaps even more importantly) my feelings for the book. I was attempting to do just that a number of nights ago with a friend, and wound up choked up and slipping the tears from my eyes as I touched on a scene of inevitable sorrow. My emotions continue to ride ever so close to the surface with this book, with Patroclus and Achilles. I stayed away from Madeline Miller 's debut novel for awhile for several reasons, among them my fear of said sorrow as well as the usual concern when one comes to a retelling of characters and stories one loves. But eventually that cover — the gold foil, you guys, the glorious gold foil — and the parade of ecstatic reviews got to me enough that I grabbed a copy the next time I was at the library and settled down that night to see. Patroclus has always led the uneasiest ...

Forget what I said before about pacing ourselves when it comes to upcoming pretties. We are just gonna go ahead and switch over our regular programming to All Covers All The Time .  And today's reveal is an absolute delight. You all know how I feel about Laura Florand 's Amour et Chocolat books, which is to say roughly how I feel about a box of delicate macarons, a cup of rich hot chocolate, and a plane ticket to Paris— put them in my hands. So that's why I was over the moon to hear Laura is launching a whole new series set in Paris and featuring three young women attempting to make their way in the male-dominated world of French haute cuisine. All for You  focuses on Célie who was Dom's chef chocolatier in The Chocolate Touch , which thing fills me with glee. Because snippets of Dom! Some crushes aren’t meant to be When her older brother’s best friend left to join the Foreign Legion, eighteen-year-old Célie moved on to make a life for herself as a Paris choco...

Normally, I like to space out the book cover posts a tad. But I simply couldn't wait with this gorgeous cover (her dress . . . the fog . . . gah) just being revealed for A Curious Beginning —the first book in Deanna Raybourn 's upcoming Victorian mystery series. The series follows Veronica Speedwell—a scientist with a taste for adventure. There is an enigmatic German baron, a bad-tempered historian named Stoker, murder, mayhem, oh my.  A Curious Beginning is due out September 1st. Yippee!

I have been on pins and needles ever since finishing Jackaby for news of the sequel, and now it's finally here! I love this cover, you guys. I love the colors, I especially love that it's Abigail's silhouette, and I can't wait to hold it and admire it on the shelf rubbing shoulders with its predecessor. I'm very much looking forward to finding out what beasties Abigail and Jackaby (and Charlie!) will be tracking this time around. I will confess to having been hoping the next one would be titled simply Rook . But, alas, it was a meager hope at best.  Beastly Bones is due out September 22nd. Until then, we shall have to make do with dreaming.

Glowing recommendations from my trusty Chachic and the lovely Laura Florand put this book (and series ) on my radar awhile back and I proceeded to add it to my ever-growing TBR. And then I just sort of continued to put it off since a copy wasn't readily available at any of the usual sources and the ebook was (and is) a whopping $7.99. Then I hit a sick weekend and nothing, but nothing was hitting the spot. So I bit the bullet and dove in. It's worth pointing out that I'm not a huge connoisseur of small town contemporaries, and I was not a little concerned that it would prove to be (as has happened a number of times in the past) a little too cozy for my taste. But of course the range within that subgenre is as wide as it is with any other, and I think I just hadn't come across the right recipe. Happily, Virginia Kantra 's Dare Island series hit just the right spot for this quasi-cozy-phobic reader. Allison Carter came to Dare Island in the hopes of shedding the...

All right. I can accept that I am coming monumentally late to the party with this one. And I have no excuses for myself. Plenty of you sang its praises, and that many award stickers plastered all over a cover generally indicate there is something of value inside. To say nothing of that ridiculously gorgeous cover declaring to all and sundry that herein lie beautiful things. Basically, everything pointed to win and I just failed to pick up on the signals. To the degree that I didn't even really know what Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe   was about. At all. Fast forward a couple of years to the present day when I run across Forever Young Adult's review and finally have my ah-ha moment. I ran to my local library, snagged their lovely copy, and took it home with me to see how these fancifully-monikered boys and I would get on. Spoilers: SPLENDIDLY. I had all kinds of tragic reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes ...

I have my pal  Li to thank for steering me in the direction of Elizabeth Harmon 's debut novel Pairing Off . She clued me in to its existence, pointed out that it featured Olympic figure skaters, and well . . . that was all she wrote, folks. I am a huge figure skating fan. And while I actually haven't read many books that focus on the sport, there was simply no way I was going to not read a book billed as " The Cutting Edge with a Russian twist." I adored that movie as a kid. As you can probably tell, I haven't been so much with the review writing of late. Happily, that is in no way an indication of how my reading has fared, because I have been reading up a storm. But lately I never seem to get around to sitting down and hashing it out. But with the figure skating World Championships coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought it was the perfect time to highlight this little gem. Carrie Parker is fairly certain life as she knew it is over when her career as a p...