Eva Ibbotson: The Secret of Platform 13

This past Christmas afforded me the happy opportunity of researching what-next-after-Potter? books for a young relation, and of course I’m reading a bunch myself. This book shares the plot detail of a mysterious train platform leading to another world*, but what it reminded me of most was Roald Dahl, perhaps because cute, quirky, and creepy

Stephen M. Irwin: The Dead Path

I can’t say The Dead Path didn’t get its hooks into me: I finished the final hundred pages at a single sitting, anxious for one of its characters, in particular, to escape the morass. There are some clever aspects to how it works an old religion into a modern tale; Irwin’ prose is reliably serviceable

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List

I absolutely adored Cohn and Levithan’s Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, a young adult romance partly set in The Strand, with a hefty epistolary component and a dash of screwball comedy. I didn’t enjoy Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List nearly as much, partly due to mismatched expectations. This was a rare case where

Clifford Irving: Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time

I’m not even trying to separate my reaction to this book from the backstory: Irving, a novelist (a fraudster, in other words, because a novel is a pack of lies upon the credibility of which its success depends), here offers a purportedly non-fictional book about art forger Elmyr de Hory (a profession which combines fraud

Lee Irby: The Up and Up

Small-time hood Frank Hearn makes it out of Irby’s previous Prohibition-era caper novel 7,000 Clams with his skin fundamentally intact and the love of a really terrific dame, but (no spoiler, really) without enough scratch to give her the kind of life he wants to. So in this sequel he goes straight and tries to

Lee Irby: 7,000 Clams

I think the worst thing about becoming a baseball fan for me is getting infested by the magical thinking associated with the sport. This intricately-plotted, noirish crime novel features Babe Ruth (as a Yankee, in the 1925 offseason) and I found myself vaguely worried that reading it was somehow disloyal to my team. But there’s