Rowling shocks the easily shockable (and thrills legions of fanfic writers)
...by announcing over the weekend that beloved wizarding icon Dumbledore was gay!GO, J.K. ROWLING! Hell, if your books are going to be banned left and right anyway, why not strike a blow for equa...
M.T. Anderson Speaks! (Part II)
(Here's the link to Part I of this interview. Again, the High School TV reporter is referred to in this interview as "HSR", the interviewer from George Mason University is referred to as "GMU", a...
Cover-Up: Mystery at the Super Bowl, by John Feinstein
John Feinstein’s Cover-Up: Mystery at the Super Bowl offers an appealing alternative to the majority of books aimed at preteen male readers (most of which seem to feature wizards, spies, and/or laser-toting aliens). While Cover-Up includes its fair share of armed thugs and sneering bad guys, it’s basically a thoughtful, entertaining novel about the world of sports journalism...
Celebrities reading, part II
It's not as deliciously apropos as Paris Hilton carrying around a copy of Valley of the Dolls, but trainwreck-at-large Britney Spears was recently photographed reading a copy of The Lion, the Witc...
Bookseller news
Barnes and Noble is currently featuring a video interview with Terry Pratchett. (I'm finding that their new site is about 20% slower and fifty times more irritating than their old one. Is any on...
Awards season
Well, the National Book Awards finalists have been announced, and—surprise!—we've read exactly one of 'em. (And it's a picture book: Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in case you wer...
Mine Till Midnight, by Lisa Kleypas
Lisa Kleypas’s Victorian romances are always first-rate, so it comes as no surprise that her most recent effort, Mine Till Midnight, is beautifully written, precisely plotted, and filled with appealing, fully developed characters. Kleypas cannibalizes some of her earlier stories for this book, but Mine Till Midnight is more than entertaining enough to rise above a few familiar plot twists...
M.T. Anderson Speaks! (Part I)
Behold again: here's the first part of my interview with the fantastically awesome M.T. Anderson! The second part will be posted soon. Please note that this interview includes questions from a s...
Great news for manhwa fans...
We've been complaining for a while about the demise of ICE Kunion, the English-language publisher of several of our favorite manhwa titles. (Hey, the idea that we'd never find out what happened i...
Ms. Black Speaks!
Behold, my interview with the fantastically awesome Holly Black, author of the Wordcandy Featured Book pick Ironside:1. Can you give us any news on your upcoming story The White Cat? Does it hav...
Heyer done wrong
I have limited bookshelf space for my Georgette Heyer collection, and if I was smart, I'd save it for the beautiful Sourcebooks editions of her books. But life is uncertain, and I fret. What if ...
National Book Festival
Encouraged by Julia's belief that I would be found wandering around the National Mall, hopelessly lost, I headed out to join the other tens of thousands of book lovers at the Library of Congress's...
Something to look forward to...
Two of our favorite Wordcandy YA authors have new books scheduled for the spring:Peter Abrahams has announced that the third book in his excellent Echo Falls mystery series will be called Into the...
Hooked, by Jane May
As our longtime readers know, we here at Wordcandy rarely turn down a re-told fairytale, even when it’s just another teen-girl-friendly version of Cinderella. We’re particularly excited when the fairytale in question is an unusual one, which is why we were all a-flutter over Jane May’s Hooked, a modern retelling of The Fisherman and His Wife...
The Sweet, Terrible, Glorious Year I Truly, Completely, Lost It, by Lisa Shanahan
I don’t know much about Australian entertainment. My knowledge of their popular culture is limited to Strictly Ballroom, a single episode of Kath & Kim I caught in England, and an Australian romance novel that I read a few years ago, which featured such outdated sexual politics that I originally thought it was written in the sixties...
It's that time of year again
Welcome to Banned Books Week!Looking for a banned book to read? Lucky for you, there's no reason to leave the house: half the childhood classics on your bookshelf have been banned or challenged ...
The Dead Guy Interviews, by Michael A. Stusser
I still have my battered middle school copy of DK Publishing's Chronicle of America. It’s held together with duct tape and prayers, but I’m going to keep it forever. The Chronicle was a massive ...
Odds and ends
Please note that if you missed out on the season premiere of Gossip Girl last week, don’t worry: iTunes has the pilot episode available for free download.CNN.com is featuring a list of strange and...
Manga releases galore
I’ve been having some irritating manga experiences lately, so I'm happy to see that there will be volumes of all three of my favorite mangas coming out in the next few weeks:1. Volume 13 of The W...
Sequel news
We've had about a zillion search string hits this month from people looking for information on the sequel to Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy. So here's a compilation of what (little) we know:1. T...
History Lesson for Girls, by Aurelie Sheehan
Aurelie Sheehan writes with delicate, lyrical precision, her characters are memorable and three-dimensional, her sense of time and place imbues every page... and if she'd shown the tiniest bit of self-restraint...
East Coast does O.C.
Have you been feeling the lack of crazy fashion, spoiled teens, social outcasts, trendy music, underage drinking, awkwardly flirtatious "banter", and brooding underdogs? Well, buck up, 'cause it'...