Courtney Milan: After the Wedding

I very much appreciate how Courtney Milan inverts and subverts familiar romance tropes, and “After the Wedding” is no exception: it literally starts with a wedding, in which the principals are forced at gunpoint to marry, and their efforts to obtain an annulment, coupled with their inconveniently increasing mutual attraction, drive much of the plot.

Shannon Hale: Austenland

The titular Austenland is like Channel 4’s Regency House Party historical/reality TV re-imagined as an upscale vacation experience: a handful of wealthy women hie themselves to “Pembrook Park,” a country house where they indulge in a properly reserved and G-rated flirtation with actors playing the part of Regency gentlemen. Hale makes a lot of extremely

Alyssa Goodnight: Austentatious

There was a lot I enjoyed about Austentatious, but also a fair bit I found problematic. The novel scored big points with me early on by dropping a reference to The Princess Bride without belaboring it with an explanation. And I enjoyed its breezy, nerd-culture-reference-spiked tone throughout. I’m generally favorably inclined toward modern spins on

Caitlin R. Kiernan: Alabaster

Dancy Flamarrion is a young drifter shadowed by a being that calls itself an angel and tells her to go places and kill things. Not people, usually, depending on how you define your terms. The stories in this volume mostly grew from a paragraph in Kiernan’s novel Threshold that lists some of Flamarrion’s prior exploits,

Jonathan Stroud: The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Smarkand demonstrated that it’s a book with the wherewithal to totally sidestep my critical sensibilities on its very first page. It opens with a description of a magician summoning a supernatural entity that is nicely atmospheric, but that will feel comfortable, even familiar, to readers familiar with the genre tropes — and

Barry Lyga : The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl

Lyga’s descriptions of what it’s like to be an unpopular, un-sporty, picked-on high school sophomore match so many specific details of my own memories that it’s uncanny. Big ugly bruises on the arm where punches land every day? Check. Lurid homicidal revenge fantasies? Check. Narrator Donnie has an escape hatch, though: he’s secretly working on

Steve Brezenoff : The Absolute Value of -1

High school: Noah loves Lily, Lily loves Simon, Simon loves pot; Noah deals pot. I was lucky enough to never be a vertex in a warped little quadrilateral precisely like this, but the geometry of misery feels plenty familiar and accurate anyway. Brezenoff lays it out in first-person narration from the three principles, with book-ending

Derek Sivers : Anything You Want

A couple of Derek Sivers stories: My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I

Mark Chadbourn : Age of Misrule – World’s End

World’s End felt throughout like a book I expected to like, and I wonder if I might’ve liked it better if I’d encountered it earlier. It’s a heroic fantasy of the magic-returns-to-the-modern-world variety. Chadbourn clearly knows a lot about the myths and legends of the British Isles, and this was what I enjoyed most in

Lynne Rae Perkins: As Easy as Falling off the Face of the Earth

Wow. There are so many things I love about this book. There’s careful prose like this: Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin