November 2, 2009 – 3:52 pm
I have a huge fondness for stories of (for lack of a better word) wacky heroines. I don’t mean chick lit women, the ones who can’t balance their checkbook and lose their undies in the train station. I mean the ones who are obstinately marching along to their own drummer, wearing funny hats, playing in a ukulele band, eschewing fish net stockings. Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written some great ones, and so has another of my favorite authors, Christie Ridgeway.
Well, this last weekend I discovered Julia Harper’s contemporaries (she writes historicals as Elizabeth Hoyt) – and another […]
I’m always being asked which novel is my favorite. For goodness’ sake, people, that’s like asking me which of my two children is my favorite! The only possible answer is: the book that isn’t whining at me at the moment – i.e., any novel that’s out of my computer, out of copyedits, out of proofs, and safely on the shelves. I have huge fondness for all my printed heroes and heroines. I miss them, especially the heroines. By the time a book is finished, each of my heroines has become my girlfriend. She talks to me in the middle of […]
~buy this book~
I still remember discovering Susan Elizabeth Phillips – which happened to me, oddly enough, through an English bookstore in Florence, Italy. This was years ago. It was early evening and hot as the blazes (that was before my husband and I succumbed to installing air conditioning in his mother’s Italian apartment). So I was lying on a hot couch, drinking a gin-and-tonic, and reading SEP. And laughing. I laughed so hard that I fell off the couch and my husband accused me of drinking too much, thereby instigating a marital quarrel…
He was so wrong! I was drunk on […]
~buy this book~
I have to admit it. I love wallflowers. I think it’s the memory of a painful prom night sitting at the edge of the gym while couples circled the room to Stairway to Heaven, the girls with their arms limply around their partners’ necks. Since my date is now Out, I don’t count this as much of a personal failure (that’s my story and I’m keeping to it!).
But still…those charming memories mean that I have a huge fondness for a girl who isn’t circling the room in the arms of the football hero. And if she’s snappy and […]
September 2, 2008 – 1:01 pm
~ buy this book ~
I first read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in college. Years later, what’s stayed with me is a fascination with magical realism and one story about Márquez. When he finished One Hundred Years, his wife Mercedes pawned her hair dryer and the electric heater in order to pay for postage to mail it to a publisher. Even then, they had to mail it in two parts because they didn’t have enough postage!
So what is “magical realism”? A story with fantastic elements – told as if those elements were absolutely normal. (I should put […]
