His Majesty’s Dragon begins when Captain Will Laurence’s ship has just overpowered a French ship. Napoleon is slowly conquering Europe, so any defeat of the French, no matter how small, is a big deal. As Will’s crew is inventorying the French ship’s cargo, they find something unusual: a dragon egg. But complications arise when they […]
Ceony Twill has put herself through magic school in only a year when most people take two. She’s a smart girl and she’s hoping that her magic will be based on metal. She wants to design weapons and machines and things that matter. Instead, she gets paper. Boring old, get-it-wet-and-it-falls-apart paper. She’s crushed. She hopes […]
Ursula Todd is born on a cold winter’s night in England in 1910…over and over again. Sometimes she is stillborn, other times she makes it through, only to die later and start over at the same place. Each time, something is a little different and her life takes drastically diverging paths as a result. Someone […]
The Lenore women grow a rare flower that is the secret ingredient in their powerful perfume. Each generation, only a few women are chosen to wear their coveted scent. These women inevitably rise to the top of their professions and become the envy of the world. But Willow, Mya, and Lucia Lenore, the current generation, […]
In this modern-day retelling of Jane Eyre, Jane Moore is a penniless student who’s just had to drop out of college and take a job as a nanny working for rock star Nico Rathburn. I love Jane Eyre. I love Mr. Rochester. The idea of this book intrigued me. How exactly would all that Gothic […]
Testimony covers a lot of ground, from the making of the movie, Schindler’s List, to the idea of filming Holocaust survivor testimonies, to the actual project, and now sharing the testimonies and collecting new ones from ongoing genocides around the world. The first half of the book kept my attention better than the second half. […]
Scott Landon, award-winning novelist, died two years ago. His wife, Lisey, is finally cleaning out his study. As she goes through his old papers, awards, and photos, buried memories come boiling to the surface. Then she gets a call from a man who tells her to hand over her late husband’s unpublished work or face […]
Hannah Gray is now an old woman, reliving the summer when she was seventeen and in love. She’s revisiting her grandparents’ house on the coast of Maine and re-reading her journal from that summer. She was fighting with her stepmother, her father was back home in Boston, and the house they had rented was haunted […]
Rahima lives in a family of girls. Her father was a fighter for the local war lord in their Afghan village and he’s now addicted to opium. With custom demanding that the girls never leave the house without a male family member to escort them, they’re struggling. When Rahima’s aunt comes to visit, bearing stories […]
Percy Jackson finds himself entering a camp of Roman demigods near San Francisco with only the vaguest memory of who he is. The Romans accept him and he finds himself on a quest with Hazel and Frank, a couple of other demigods. They must make their way to Alaska, “The Land Beyond the Gods,” defeat […]
Malala Yousafzai was only fifteen when she was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban for speaking out for education for everyone around the world, but especially for girls, and especially in Muslim countries. She miraculously survived and now has an even larger audience for her message. I think I’d heard a […]