Out of Line: Growing Up Soviet, by Tina Grimberg
Tina Grimberg’s Out Of Line: Growing Up Soviet is an excellent, surprisingly optimistic account of her childhood in the Ukrainian city of Kiev in the sixties and seventies. Grimberg’s book...
Babymouse: Skater Girl, by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Brother/sister creative team Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm’s Babymouse books are a series of witty, girl-friendly graphic novels starring Babymouse, a anthropomorphic young mouse obsessed with...
Poetry Speaks Expanded, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby
Poetry Speaks Expanded, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, is an updated version of the 2001 collection Poetry Speaks. This remarkable book features poems from 47 of the greatest ...
The Tokyo Look Book, by Philomena Keet and Yuri Manabe
With text by anthropologist Philomena Keet and pictures by Yuri Manabe, The Tokyo Look Book attempts to give readers a complete tour of the Tokyo fashion scene. While it doesn’t quite manage to c...
Regency revisited
Michèle Ann Young’s No Regrets features one of the most tantalizing opening sequences I’ve seen in ages, and a plot that borrows heavily from Georgette Heyer. (Hey, if you’re going to borrow your ...
The Birds redux
In surprisingly positive movie adaptation news, Naomi Watts is said to be starring in an upcoming remake of The Birds. According to the article I saw, this time they're apparently trying to stick...
Exit Strategy, by Kelley Armstrong
Kelley Armstrong can pack a lot of story into a 480-page paperback. Exit Strategy, the first book in her series about a hitwoman-with-a-heart-of-slightly-tarnished-gold, features more plot twists, setting changes, and major characters than you can shake a stick at...
New and (much, much) improved
I've been waiting a long time for somebody to give Lucy Maud Montgomery's books new cover art. I've seen a few decent-looking editions of Anne of Green Gables recently, but nobody seems to be lea...
Manga news
Wired magazine is currently featuring an article called "How Manga Conquered the U.S.—A Graphic Guide to Japan's Coolest Export". The article, which is told through manga-style text and artwork, ...
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...