1. After finishing Marque and Reprisal by Elizabeth Moon, I headed to the nearest used bookstore in the hopes that I would find a copy of Engaging the Enemy, but alas. I will have to hunt for the third Vatta’s War book because I would like to read it soon!
Following the vicious attack against her family from an unknown quarter, Ky has to make decisions that affect not only her ship and crew but her family business and future. The new characters introduced, her cousin Stella best known for giving company secrets to her boyfriend as a teen, and Rafe, a dealer in the black market and likely a spy, do not seem like helpful allies, but Ky intends to exact revenge using whatever means she can.
2. Here is the way Kelly Link writes a story. She takes a decorated plate and smashes it, then plucks out the pieces she thinks are interesting and reassembles them into kind of a bowl. Or she takes slightly more than half of the pieces out of a puzzle and decoupages them onto an old movie poster. Except that the puzzle is the story of what happened and the thing she ends up with at the end is a deliberately fragmented version of the narrative, sometimes with other things woven in.
If you like the fragmented bits to have unexplained phenomena like Baba Yaga, fairies, demons, superheroes, and other strangeness, you will love Get in Trouble, of which I have read exactly three stories and liked one. I will still be reading on with the expectation of liking most of what she offers.
3. In Cotillion by Georgette Heyer, Kitty is the adopted daughter of a gouty old curmudgeon who decides to leave her his fortune only if she marries one of his four great-nephews: a half-witted duke, a strait-laced rector, and two exceedingly well-dressed gentlemen of no profession. To spite Jack and to get to London where everything happens, Kitty asks Freddy to pretend to be engaged to her, an offer which he reluctantly accepts. In London, Kitty is made the companion of Freddy’s sister, becomes acquainted–entirely by accident–with some disreputable people, plays matchmaker, displays very good taste in fashion, and realizes Jack is not quite the person she thought he was. Freddy, either, come to that. Another fantastically funny Regency romance.
4. Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse is about Hanneke, a Dutch girl whose boyfriend Bas died in the war and who wants to profit from her position as a black market messenger without engaging her feelings or her principles. But when Mrs. Janssen begs her to look for the missing Marjam, a Jewish girl who had been living in her pantry, Hanneke becomes involved, despite herself, in resisting the Germans.
This gorgeously written, suspenseful, and completely believable young adult historical fiction novel is filled with loss and courage as the complex and conflicted Hanneke evolves into a hero. Also with an excellent supporting cast in Ollie, Bas’s brother, and Mina, a Jewish teenager. At its heart is the mystery of what happened to the girl in the blue coat, and the answer is nothing like what I’d expected.
Advertisements Share this:
