Oct 17
2004
Jasper Fforde is the author of a series of dazzlingly silly and imaginative alternate universe/adventure/detective stories, including The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, ...
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Oct 17
2004
C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are Wordcandy classics, and I am afraid that yes, you do have to read them. If you read them as a kid, it was probably pretty easy to just ignore all the anvil-s...
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Oct 16
2004
The character of Timothy Hunter--the original black-haired, bespectacled British boy wizard--was introduced in a Neil Gaiman-penned miniseries in 1990, and DC's Vertigo Comics has trotted him out ...
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Oct 7
2004
The Hungarian-born novelist Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Orczy is best known as the Baroness Orczy, the author of the Wordcandy classic The Scarlet Pimpernel. Orczy began her career as an ...
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Oct 7
2004
T. H. White is the author of 1958's The Once and Future King, a "novel" (actually a collection of four of his earlier books) that begins with the education of the young King Arthur and ends with h...
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Sep 25
2004
If you took any good caper movie, turned it into a book, added a boatload of tongue-in-cheek licentiousness, and stuck the whole thing in a plummy P.G. Wodehouse-style setting, you’d still en...
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Sep 23
2004
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an extraordinary book, but Bloomsbury’s attempt to market it as “Harry Potter for grown-ups” is misleading. Clarke’s ten-years-in-the-making debut novel is a witty, wildly imaginative book that’s certain to knock the socks off any English Lit major...
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Sep 16
2004
If your only experience with Charles Dickens's books is reading A Tale of Two Cities for your high school literature class, you aren't doing him justice. I am sorry to say that after that truly e...
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Aug 19
2004
Madeleine E. Robins tried writing several different types of genre fiction--romances, sci-fi stories, comic books--before hitting literary paydirt with 2003's Point of Honour. This mystery series...
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Aug 19
2004
Short, sweet, and witty, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs was the 1912 equivalent of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries books. Webster's heroine, 18-year-old orphan Judy Abbott, is stunned to discover t...
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Aug 19
2004
Englishwoman Susanna Clarke is the author of the almost universally praised novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews) as well as a handful of shor...
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Aug 19
2004
Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is my favorite of the Bronte sisters' books. Unlike Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, it focuses on the consequences of Byronic behavior, rather than wadin...
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Aug 19
2004
See Nora Roberts. Same person, different name. Note: The J and D in this pen name are the initials of Ms. Roberts’s sons.
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Aug 19
2004
Nora Roberts doesn't always live up to her full potential, but she is one of contemporary fiction's most consistently intelligent and entertaining writers. While it seems like she puts out a doze...
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Aug 19
2004
Despite being the author of the totally awesome The Phantom Tollbooth, the geek classic The Dot and the Line, and a handful of other bizarre-but-amazing kids' books, Norton Juster's focus has rema...
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Aug 19
2004
We here at Wordcandy firmly believe that Lisa Kleypas is the Western World's finest living historical romance novelist. Her books are thoroughly researched without being obnoxious about it, her c...
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Aug 19
2004
Ms. Krentz has the distinction of having seven different pen names. Some of them write better than others. Note: Most of her books under the Krentz name are reasonably entertaining contemporary ...
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Aug 17
2004
It’s not that Meg Cabot’s most recent young adult novel Teen Idol is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a clever, entertaining, and occasionally thought-provoking read. If Teen Idol had been written by an unknown author, I would have been thrilled to discover it and immediately passed it around to all of my friends...
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Aug 14
2004
Elizabeth Von Armin’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April is one of the most soothing books I have ever read. The story is simple: four very different Englishwomen respond to an advertisement for a mo...
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Aug 14
2004
I thought that Jennifer Weiner’s first book, the bestselling Good in Bed, was pretty good. I was bored by the angsty absentee-father plotline and rolled my eyes at the melodramatic ending, but st...
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Aug 14
2004
Edith Wharton was an extraordinary writer, but I think that most people would agree that reading one of her full-length novels is plenty. While I do have a certain masochistic affection for the P...
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Aug 14
2004
American readers may be surprised to learn that P.G. Wodehouse (creator of the British icon Jeeves, the penultimate "gentleman's gentleman") is actually quite the figure of controversy in Great Br...
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Aug 14
2004
While most of Patricia Wrede’s early fantasy books read like sub-par Robin McKinley, her Dealing With Dragons series and her fairytale adaptation Snow White and Rose Red are both very entertaining...
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Aug 14
2004
If you don't know who J. K. Rowling is, you've been living under a rock. If you have rejected reading her books out of a knee-jerk reaction to their overwhelming popularity or the belief that no ...
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Aug 14
2004
The most famous of the 18th century Gothic novelists, Ann Radcliffe is not everybody's Wordcandy. As I do not feel that I can improve upon this truly masterful description of Mrs. Radcliffe's fav...
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Aug 14
2004
Books like Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost and Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs are America's answer to the books of Lucy Maud Montgomery. If Stratton-Porter's heroine is a little ...
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Aug 14
2004
Josephine Tey is not an easy writer to pigeonhole. All of her books are mysteries, but they vary so much in tone and style that it’s difficult to classify them. Brat Farrar, for example, has lit...
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Aug 14
2004
If one were to judge the British population by the diary entries of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, or Louise Rennison’s Georgia Nicholson, it would be pretty easy to a...
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Aug 14
2004
Once, during a long-ago NPR interview, I listened to an Amazon.com employee blithely recommending Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes mysteries to the parent of a five-year-old. Um… no. (Unless y...
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Aug 14
2004
Mary Stewart is best known for her Merlin trilogy. They are beautifully written, and anyone who likes Arthurian legend should enjoy them. (Although I can't say that I do. But then, the only ver...
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