A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to: --Grab your current read --Let the book open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. --You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! “He had been careful, yet he had also been a fool. He had carried letter, he had raised sums of money, and he had asked no questions, and part of him despised himself for becoming involved with the sordid and temporal business of politics, the absurdities of who had the right to what title.” --From The Maiden , by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

I usually love timeslip novels like this. A first-century Celtic princess’s life parallels that of a modern-day woman, who escapes to Wales to avoid someone who attacked her in London. Later Jess, the modern-day woman, goes to Rome, partly to escape her attacker (who followed her to Wales), partly to research Eigon’s story. I thought I couldn’t go completely wrong with a premise like this. The premise is good, but the execution of the book falls far short of my expectations I enjoyed the historical part of the novel, but it took me a while (about 300 pages) to get in to Jess’s story in the present day. You really have to suspend your sense of disbelief at this book, peppered as it is with too many coincidences and deus ex machinas to save the day to count. It’s lazy writing, in my opinion. And although Erskine conveys Jess’s sense of panic at being stalked really well, through the first 200 pages or so, I found myself thinking, “OK, I get it now, can we move on to the more interesting ...

The Rossetti Letter is a dual time period novel. In the modern day, Claire Donovan is completing her doctoral degree in early modern European history, writing her dissertation on the Spanish Conspiracy of 1618, in which the Spanish ambassador to Venice planned a takeover of the Republic. The plot of the conspiracy was denounced by a courtesan named Alessandra Rossetti, who had lovers in many influential places. Claire travels to Venice, where she finds that someone else, a well-known Cambridge historian, is writing a book on the exact same subject she is. I enjoyed the historical part of this novel much more than the modern-day bits. It’s clear that the author doesn’t know much about modern-day academia. First, it stretches credibility that someone completing her doctorate would not have visited the country in which her dissertation is set. Claire’s dissertation is on the Spanish Conspiracy, yet before the events of the book, she’d never set foot in Venice or Spain to do her research....

More TBR: The Coral Thief , by Rebecca Stott. All I know about it is that it’s historical fiction; coming out in September. The Counterfeit Guest , by Rose Melikan . Historical mystery set in the late 18th century.

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is the sequel to Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. This time the tables are turned—a young 19th century woman named Jane Mansfield wakes up in the body of Courtney Stone, a 21st century woman living in LA. Jane here has more challenges to overcome than Courtney did, as she learns to adopt herself to a totally new life. Along the way, she becomes attracted to Wes, one of Courtney’s friends. She also learns a lot about herself, and she learns that the 21st century isn’t so much different from the 19th, after all. This book was a quick read; I finished it in two sittings. It’s enjoyable for the most part, and funny. There’s good character development, but only insofar as Jane/ Courtney goes; the other characters aren’t as well defined. The ending of the novel was very open-ended, too. There’s not much focus on how or why Jane and Courtney exchanged bodies (yes, Courtney hit her head in a pool and Jane fell off her horse, but that doesn’t quite ...

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to: --Grab your current read --Let the book open to a random page. Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. --You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! “This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the “debut,” ugh, of a “genuine, American girl.” Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days “brownies” meant young Girl Guides, just as “Cubs” meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to east some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her w...

It’s a quiet weekend, BUT this week I finally bough tickets for a vacation I’m planning for September. Guess where I’m going? LONDON! I haven’t been back to England in seven years, and it’s definitely time for a return trip. I’ll be there for a week, and I’m staying at the St. Giles hotel on Bedford Avenue, very close to nearly everything (it’s also a stone’s throw from this former bookshop). I’ve got ideas for the things I want to see, but I need some help: if you’ve been to London, what else do you think I should do while I’m there? I wanted to go to the V&A, the British Museum, Hatchard’s Bookshop, Persephone Bookshop, Temple Church, the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub (where Samuel Johnson and Voltaire, Thackeray, and Dickens were patrons), go see a show (Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is playing, as is Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black ), and a few other places. I fell as though I won’t have enough time to get it all in!