Oct 25
2005
Kiyoko Arai’s Beauty Pop is the oft-told shōjo story of a quiet girl attending a high school that’s ruled by a group of gorgeous male bullies… but in Arai’s story, the bullies are the sons of...
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Oct 25
2005
Ichiha’s Pheromania Syndrome is yet another shōjo manga about a physically mismatched couple. Ichiha’s tall, masculine heroine, Hatori, is in love with her tiny, delicate (male) childhood fr...
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Oct 25
2005
Kamio Yoko’s Hana Yori Dango (English title: Boys Over Flowers) was a massively successful manga that ran for ELEVEN YEARS. (The author once said that toward the end of the series she found herse...
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Oct 25
2005
She’s not exactly a groundbreaking new talent, but Mimi Tajima’s stories (Koi Suru ¼, Ichigo Channel, and Aoi Spice) are consistently excellent examples of conventional shōjo manga. Tajima’s...
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Oct 25
2005
Hisaya Nakajo’s Hana-Kimi (original Japanese title: Hanazakari no Kimitachi E, English title: Hana-Kimi: For You in Full Blossom) is my favorite of the seemingly endless number of stories about a ...
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Oct 25
2005
Emura’s W-Juliet is one of those rare romances (of any type) that features a main couple that, in addition to being attracted to one another, are completely believable as friends. Despite an outw...
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Oct 25
2005
So-Hee Park is the author of the excellent Korean manhwa Goong. Goong is an alternate universe story about an ordinary high school girl forced to marry into the Korean royal family. (In Park’s w...
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Oct 24
2005
Yayoi Ogawa is the author of three josei mangas: Kimi ha Pet (English title: Tramps Like Us), Candy Life, and Baby Pop. Ogawa’s distinctive art style and truly bizarre romantic pairings have litt...
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Oct 24
2005
Tomoko Hayakawa’s Perfect Girl Evolution (licensed by Del Rey, original Japanese title Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge, English title: The Wallflower) is my favorite manga. Picture, if you will, a t...
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Aug 26
2005
As you all know, we here at Wordcandy are strong believers in the power of cover art. If you want someone to take your book seriously--i.e., shell out big bucks for the hardback version--then you...
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Aug 25
2005
Ngaio Marsh, one of the four “Great Ladies” of English mystery writing, had a career that spanned approximately fifty years, beginning in 1932 and ending with her death in the 1980s. While her my...
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Aug 25
2005
Farley Mowat, author of the Canadian classics Owls in the Family and Never Cry Wolf, is actually quite the figure of controversy in Canada. His detractors (including The Toronto Star) have sugges...
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Aug 25
2005
Scottish-born author A. A. Milne is best remembered as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. This delightful series has the distinction of being perhaps the only literary creation that Disney ...
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Aug 25
2005
Andrew Clements has written a series of pleasantly earnest, thoughtful children’s books, including the excellent YA sci-fi/fantasy Things Not Seen. Clements spent several years as a teacher, and ...
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Aug 25
2005
Frenchman Lewis Trondheim is the author of about fifty bazillion comic books, the majority of which are being (slowly) translated into English. His series Dungeon, co-written with Joann Sfar, is ...
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Jul 11
2005
Jean Craighead George has written many interesting, lofty-minded, award-winning novels. Of these, my favorite is My Side of the Mountain, a beautiful story about a young boy who runs away from ho...
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Jul 11
2005
Stephanie Barron is the author of a series of novels featuring Jane Austen as an amateur detective. Ms. Barron's books are structured as Austen's long-lost diaries, recently discovered in an atti...
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Jul 11
2005
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great is an amateur detective with a loyal dog, an assortment of weird friends, and a profound (perhaps existential?) hunger for pancakes. He is also the hero ...
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Jul 11
2005
Debi Gliori's Pure Dead... series is like an amalgamation of the Artemis Fowl stories, the Addams Family cartoons, and the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Nothing about these books is particu...
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Jul 11
2005
Daphne du Maurier's major Wordcandy contribution is her gothic suspense novel Rebecca. Rebecca has never been a particular favorite of mine--I've always regarded it as an inferior version of Jane...
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Jul 11
2005
(Sorry--this is less a Book of the Week Review than it is book-related musings.) So... have you all been following the completely bizarre courtship of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? (And if not, you totally should be! May we suggest www.pinkisthenewblog.com as a particularly fine source for TomKat news?) Anyway, in a(nother) vaguely disturbing interview...
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Jun 24
2005
Agatha Christie is the world's most famous mystery writer. She's right up there with the Bible and Shakespeare in terms of sales, you can find her books in 45 different languages, and her most fa...
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Jun 24
2005
Warning: Damning Confession (for a bibliophile) Straight Ahead: I... I have always felt that Agatha Christie's stories make better TV shows than they do books. I know! I'm sorry! Just typing t...
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Jun 24
2005
English mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers understood that what this world really needed was a crime-solving hero that was equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. She set o...
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Jun 24
2005
Scottish novelist, poet, and clergyman George MacDonald is the author of a pair of pleasantly Victorian children's classics: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. While these g...
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Jun 24
2005
If the children's books of George MacDonald have "fallen out of fashion", then the books of Margery Sharp are the literary equivalent of the bustle... and I really have no idea why. What happened...
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Jun 24
2005
Much like fellow Wordcandy authors Julia Quinn and Suzanne Enoch, Karen Hawkins is less spectacular than she is consistently entertaining. She has yet to write a novel that knocks my socks off, b...
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Apr 28
2005
My copy of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Greensleeves is battered, ugly, and features a gigantic stamp on the dust jacket reading "THIS IS NO LONGER THE PROPERTY OF THE SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY"...
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Apr 24
2005
John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain stories about Tom, his brilliant and conniving older brother, are a series of charmingly offbeat tall tales. According to Fitzgerald, Tom was the youngest con man...
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Apr 24
2005
Bram Stoker was a mediocre Irish playwright and theatrical manager who produced exactly one memorable book: 1897's Dracula. It has been suggested that Stoker's horror story was inspired by a comb...
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