Oct 25
2005
When reading Miki Aihara’s Hot Gimmick series, it’s very important to keep a few things in mind: 1. It’s only manga. 2. No one actually behaves this way. (Hopefully.)3. No one is looking to thi...
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Oct 25
2005
Fuyumi Soryo is the author of Mars, one of the best-selling shōjo comics ever released in Japan. Mars is compulsively readable--the literary equivalent of a bag of potato chips--but it’s als...
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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
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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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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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
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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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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Mar 29
2005
English author Mary Norton was the author of two children's literature classics: the Borrowers series and Bed Knob and Broomstick, which inspired the (...sigh) Disney film of the same name. Norto...
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Mar 2
2005
I enjoy books about home restoration. I once wrote a term paper passionately defending Martha Stewart's status as an American icon. I have a serious crush on Alton Brown and an even more serious one on Red Green. And while I am rarely tempted to actually attempt any of the projects that I read about or see on television, I always find the sight of other people creating stuff to be tremendously satisfying...
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Feb 28
2005
Born in 1912, writer and critic Eleanor Cameron is best remembered as the author of the charmingly bizarre Mushroom Planet books. The first book in this imaginative, entertaining series, 1954’s T...
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Feb 13
2005
Scottish author, physician, and Spiritualism expert, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Although one might quibble over the true literary "ge...
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Feb 12
2005
Neal Stephenson, like fellow Wordcandy authors Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt, occasionally seems like he's written entire novels for the sole purpose of flaunting his intelligence and bone-deep hipne...
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Jan 26
2005
From fairy tales to Edward Gorey, we here at Wordcandy have long enjoyed stories about bad things happening to good children. British author Joan Aiken has been a steady contributor to this fine literary subgenre, from the 1962 publication of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to the recent (posthumous) publication of the last book in her Wolves Chronicles, The Witch of Clatteringshaws...
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Jan 24
2005
Wilkie Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, and his books, while less famous, share many of Dickens’s strengths. (Collins was also less of a tool on the personality front, apparently.) ...
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Jan 24
2005
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
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Jan 24
2005
As with pretty much all fantasy stories published in the past decade, Herbie Brennan’s Faerie Wars series is routinely compared to Harry Potter, although the two series have almost nothing in comm...
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Dec 8
2004
English mystery novelist P.D. James is best known for her Adam Dalgliesh novels, although I expect that her two Cordelia Gray novels (which loosely connect to the Dalgliesh series) picked up in ci...
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Dec 7
2004
Although Robert Graves primarily thought of himself as a poet, he is best known as the author of the 1934 novel I, Claudius. A chatty faux-memoir, I, Claudius is possibly the most educational pot...
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Nov 29
2004
Rumiko Takahashi is the creator of four long-running, influential, and insanely entertaining manga series--Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, and InuYasha Sengoku o Togi Zoshi--as well as a h...
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Nov 29
2004
Charlaine Harris is the writer of the Aurora Teagarden and Lily Bard mysteries, as well as the extremely successful Sookie Stackhouse supernatural romance/suspense series, about a telepathic barma...
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Nov 29
2004
Philip K. Dick was a pretty messed up guy- he was married multiple times, struggled with poorly diagnosed mental illness for much of his life, and never approached the success of fellow writers Fr...
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Nov 14
2004
The lust, angst, and violence quotient in Kelley Armstrong's stories of werewolves and witches is perfectly balanced between Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate and Laurell K. Hamilton's A...
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