Thrill Ride

I guess I finally got what was coming to me.... if you read enough teen romances, eventually one of them will make your real life a cliche -- for example, in Thrill Ride by Rachel Hawthorne (which was actually a REALLY cute teen romance novel) the girl proves her love to the hot guy she likes by riding on the Magnum Force roller coaster at a fictious roller coaster park on Lake Erie. Which is identical to what I did in early July, except that the hot guy was my husband, and the roller coaster was the Millenium Force, and the roller coaster park was Cedar Point, and I rode the coaster TWICE. So, I loved this book because it was about teens working at Cedar Point for the summer, and I was just there this month, but I hated it because it was so darn cheesy and also because I had been thinking how fun it would be to set my nanowrimo novel at Cedar Point, maybe with some people who worked there over the summer and I came back and found the very same story already on the shelves at the library!
I checked it out. 297 pgs.
Also, I indulged in some Regency Romance over my lunch hour Saturday with Cut from the Same Cloth by Kathleen Baldwin. 222 pgs.
And later I read Lord Yates and the Yankee by Joy Reed. 223 pgs.

The Dashwood Sisters' Secrets of Love

The Dashwood Sisters' Secrets of Love by Rosie Rushton
Plenty of teen romance (which I like) but not enough overt references to Jane Austen (which I was expecting, given the title). Worth reading, but only if you like Austen AND teen romance, not just one or the other.
I bought it, so just hollar if you want to borrow it. 325 pgs.


The Pirates! in an adventure with Ahab by Gideon Defoe.
It's tiny, it's funny, and it's about pirates. What could be more fun?
I checked it out. 152 pgs.


Undead and Unemployed by Mary Janice Davidson
Betsy Queen of the Vampires is back, in a very similar continuation of her last adventure, except that she gets a department store job selling shoes, at least for awhile.
I listened to it. 7 hrs.

The Wizard, the Witch and Two Girls from Jersey

by Lisa Papademetriou
What to say about two girls who get sucked into the assigned reading for English class (thank goodness it was a fantasy novel and not something boring) and start interfering and changing the plot almost immediately ....

I love books that are about books, and books that take into account how much a person can truly love books and reading, and why. This was pretty fun for those reasons, although some of the unexplained parts of the ending were not very satisfying.
I checked it out. 273 pgs.

24 Girls in 7 days

by Alex Bradley

It's about high school prom. Nuff said.

I checked it out. 265 pages.

And again with the catching up....

I think I missed some, but will try to fill in...

While on a car trip to Ohio last week, Dan and I listened to The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern by Lilian Jackson Braun, to get a taste for that series. The narrator George Guidall spoke at our library last summer, that made it more interesting to listen to the book. I read Don't Look Down, a new adventure-romance by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, which was a little too action-adventure for my tastes, but then, I am a tad wimpy when it comes to violence. And I finally got to read the new Alison Bechdel graphic novel Fun Home: a family tragicomedy, which just blew me away with it's depth, humor, seriousness, poignancy, honesty...and of course the drawings only added to each scene from her life. How often do you find passages in a graphic novel that you need to read aloud to your partner? or finish a memoir and want to go back and re-read to pick up on things you know you missed because the telling was so rich? It's not a particularly happy story, or a clearly sad one, and it's hard to describe past the (sometimes shocking) plot points, but it was truly one of the best things I have read in quite a while.

I re-read The Jane Austen Book Club, for my book group. I noticed more in this reading that Karen Joy Fowler is a science fiction author. She is open to narration and exploration that I am not used to, but that I love. I'm going to have to read more of her work now.

Fun Home - 232 pgs
Don't Look Down - 373 pgs.
Jane Austen Book Club - 288 pgs.
Cat who ate Danish Modern - 5 hrs.