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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
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It’s the start of the lunar new year, specifically the year of the ox. To celebrate, I decided to make fried dumplings, from a recent recipe in the New York Times. I had to make a visit to […]
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The City of Bones is the first book in a fantasy series by Cassandra Clare, the Shadowhunter series. The book imagines a world in which magical creatures of all sorts exist, but are generally invisible to ordinary humans. […]
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The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 1 of a cycle of four books) is about magic and yearning. The main characters, all teenagers of 16 or 17 years, try to solve a magical mystery while they struggle […]
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After working through the beta readers’ comments on the first draft, I solicited another review from someone who hadn’t seen the manuscript before. This isn’t a beta reader exactly. Is there such a thing as a gamma-reader? The […]
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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike mystery that unfolds like a rose: first the petals are tightly closed, but as they open one by one, a new flower is revealed. At the start, the protagonist, who narrates […]
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I usually have at least one book I’m reading (or listening to) — often more than one. As I walk around the city or work out in the gym, audiobooks keep me company. And curling up in bed […]
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I cook a lot. And I like cooking. The pandemic hasn’t made me yearn for restaurants or do a lot of takeout (though I do worry about my friends who work in restaurants). I just keep on cooking. […]
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Where do gods come from? Cities have had gods for millennia, but how do the gods of cities come into being? It’s a messy process and, like a turtle egg hatching on the beach, there are always predators […]
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And now for vampire lingo… Vampires are obsessed with eternal life and their elitism, in that they have attained immortal life, and they believe that this is because they somehow deserve it. After all, not everyone who’s bitten […]
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