Sunday, April 29, 2007

A gluttony of young love...

Okay, so The Bride Ship by Deborah Hale was supposed to just be a straight up Regency, but it was actually an exploration of the colonization of Nova Scotia by the Brits, told through the eyes of a young Napoleonic War widow who was working to bring over a shipload of young marriageable girls to the colonies for the settlers to woo and wed. I admit there was some love, but definitely more history than I was meaning to learn from my Harlequin paperback.
I checked it out. 296 pages.

And then in an effort to find things to post about on graffiti.tscpl.org, I browsed the new YA books yesterday. Unfortunately, the only things I took home were teen paperback romances. That said, I read The Boyfriend Trick by Stephie Davis (in the First Kisses series, which in fact means that the main character gets her first kiss in the book, which is lovely because she isn't yet a jaded thirty-something burned out career woman in the publishing industry in NYC.....) 212 very quick pages.

Also by Stephie Davis, I read the Smooch teen fiction Studying Boys which at a scant 189 pages was another quick read, although I adore the idea of a "Homework Club" and I realized it is impossible much sooner than the main character.
Both of these books feature girl characters who are being pushed by their parents to succeed and have to rebel against that to find their own place. Is that a big issue today? Did I have that? I think in highschool I probably set my own standards much higher than my parents would have thought to direct them. Silly competitive (and super-smart) friends...

I also read The Poker Diaries by Liza Conrad, which had a fresh original voice in the main character of Lulu, who is being raised in uptown NYC with her trust-fund girlfriend-of-the-mayor museum-curator mother, and downtown NYC with her poker-playing father and ex-con bar-owner grandfather. Culture clash to the extreme, especially when Lulu gets drawn into a high-stakes poker game to help out a friend in trouble. Original and enjoyable. 210 pages including the poker glossary of useful slang terms and some basic game rules.

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