Skip to main content

The Sunday Salon


A very quiet Sunday here, as usual. Didn’t participate in the Readathon, but I was watching from the sidelines. I even did a little bit of reading this weekend: I finished The Royal Griffin, the second in Juliet Dymoke’s series about the Plantagenet family (this one's about Eleanor, daughter to King John and sister to Henry III, and wife of Simon de Montfort). I was also lucky enough to receive a review copy of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, by CW Gorter, and I’m about 30 pages into it. It’s very good; certainly much better than Jeanne Kalogridis’s novel on Catherine that was published last summer.

Also read this week were Spooky Little Girl, by Laurie Notaro (coming out this week; review TBP on Tuesday) and The Peacock and the Pearl, by Jennifer Lang, a library book I picked up last weekend. My rating for both books was a 3.5; likeable, but not books for my favorites shelf. I definitely think that Laurie Notato’s nonfiction is better than her fiction. Right now I’m trying to catch up on a few reviews. So, not much going on here.

How was your week?

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
I look forward to reading your review of Spooky Little Girl. The title sounded interesting so I checked out the summary on Amazon. Is it meant to be comedic or serious?

BTW, great blog title!

-Lydia
April 11, 2010 at 6:28 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.
194 comments
Read more

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...
115 comments
Read more

Review: Mariana, by Monica Dickens

Mariana is the story of one young girl’s growth towards adulthood during the 1920s and ‘30s. The book begins when Mary Shannon is eight, and traveling with her somewhat flighty mother to Charbury, her grandparents’ house; and continues up through the time that Mary is twenty-four and waiting to hear news of her husband from the war. Monica Dickens (a great-granddaughter of Charles) depicts Mary’s maturation to adulthood with perfection. The reader sympathizes with Mary as she experiences the ups and downs of relationships and careers—experimenting with both seems to be pretty characteristic of Mary, as she grapples a bit with identity and independence. And yet, there isn’t the usual amount of teenage angst that one usually finds in a novel about growing up, which I found to be very refreshing. Mary is a sweet and sometimes naïve girl, but at the same time, she’s also wonderfully sarcastic towards her peers. She’s hard to like at times, but in an odd way, I found myself sympathizing wi...
2 comments
Read more