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
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
Although I can't seem to find out anything on this woman's personal life (I know! Google has failed me!), from the mid-seventies to the early nineties, Jacqueline Gilbert was one of the best auth...
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Apr 24
2005
(Information complied with the assistance of Colleen, an University of Oregon reference librarian, and Eric Gjovaag, webmaster of the The Wizard of Oz Info website. Many thanks to both of them!) ...
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Mar 15
2005
Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly, a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies at Fordham University. Ms. James is one of the few absolutely reliable writers of historical romances....
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Mar 15
2005
To paraphrase Jane Austen, there are few romance novelists whom I really love, and fewer still of whom I think well. Eloisa James is one of the few writers whom I both love (well, more or less) and think well of—at least well enough to shell out the full cover price for, an honor that I reserve for a mere handful of authors. Her eight romance novels are fresh, well written twists on old favorites...
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Feb 28
2005
For a state that I associate mostly with soy bean farming and Biodiesel, Minnesota is peculiarly rich in Wordcandy goodness. A surprising number of famous American authors (Garrison Keillor, Laur...
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Feb 13
2005
It is rare for me to recommend a writer of historical romances that feature a pre-Regency setting. I'm sure that there are plenty of very entertaining books out there with medieval or Elizabetha...
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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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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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Dec 31
2004
Cameron Dokey is yet another author of re-told fairy tales. (Pretty soon we're going to need a special icon for just for those, aren't we?) I've read more imaginative and richly characterized ex...
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Dec 21
2004
Son of an Irish ear and eye doctor and a flamboyant nationalistic poet, Oscar Wilde is best known for his deliciously giddy plays "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "An Ideal Husband". His oth...
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Dec 8
2004
Laura Esquivel's fame hit the high-water mark with the 1993 release of Like Water For Chocolate. (The book and film versions of Like Water For Chocolate were released in the U.S. at the same time,...
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Dec 7
2004
A mystery/romance told entirely through letters (which have to be taken out of the book and read) and lushly illustrated postcards, Canadian author Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine stories are th...
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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 16
2004
Nora Roberts’s Blue Dahlia reads like a mix’n’match of about fifty of her previous books. As such, it’s a perfect introduction to her work--like most of Roberts’s books, Blue Dahlia is an enterta...
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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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Nov 3
2004
As you could probably guess from the titles of her stories (Savannah Blues, Little Bitty Lies, and Hissy Fit), Mary Kay Andrews is a very Southern writer. Her intelligent, entertaining books are ...
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Oct 17
2004
The Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel is pure, unadulterated wordcandy. It's like the literary equivalent of Scharffen Berger chocolate. This book is gorgeously written, perfectly...
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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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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
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
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
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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