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FOODFIC: Please Welcome Jeri Cafesin, Author of Disconnected

Ever had a blind date? While women are worried the guy is a psycho-killer, most guys are worried the woman will be fat. I’ve always had a… complicated relationship with food. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when heroin addict thin was trending chic. My mother’s favorite actress was Audrey Hepburn, because she was, “So beautiful and thin !” The perfect woman when I was a kid had a 36” chest, a 24” waist, and a 34” hips. A 24” waist is a size 2, in women’s clothing. How many women do you know who wear a size 2? Not me! As a writer, food plays a huge role in every story I weave. Often, as in my novel memoir, Disconnected , it’s a main character. Rachel sought what most women did—to be successful, married and in love, have healthy kids. It was hard enough attracting a man when she wasn’t heroin thin like most Hollywood women. But in the 1990s, finding a man wanting an equal partner instead of an arm piece, a woman beside him instead of behind him, seemed the impossible dream. Then along ca...

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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...

The Secret Deep, by Lindsay Galvin

The Secret Deep , by Lindsay Galvin (Scholastic, Feb 4 2020), is a sci-fi mystery/adventure that's difficult to review, because it's best read without spoilers, but hard to talk about without them.  So conclusion first--this is a fun adventure with science pushed to fantastical limits, with lots of ocean adventure, and a thought-provoking consideration of the ethics of medical consent.  It's upper middle grade (classic "tween")-- 11-14 year olds. There's some nascent romance, but it's not a plot point.   It wasn't really a book that hit all the right notes for me, but if you look at Goodreads you'll find lots of readers who loved it. It begins with two sisters, Aster and Poppy, flying to New Zealand to live with their aunt after their mother dies from cancer.  Aunt Iona is an oncologist, but she wasn't around to help her sister; instead, she was travelling frenetically around the world, helping various disadvantaged communities, seemingly unawa...

This week's round up of middle grade fantasy and sci fi from around the blogs (2/2/20)

Welcome to this week's round-up of mg fantasy and sci fi!  Please let me know if I missed your post. The Reviews All the Impossible Things, by Lindsay Lackey, at Imaginary Friends Cryptozoology for Beginners, by Euphemia Whitmore and Matt Harry, at Kid Lit Reviews The Dark Lord Clementine, by Sarah Jean Horwitz, at Sonderbooks The Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee, at Sloth Reads Frostheart, by Jaime Littler, at Arkham Reviews The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted, by Conor Greenan, at Say What? Interview with a Robot, by Lee Bacon, at Hidden In Pages (audiobook review) Midnight on Strange Street, by K.E. Ormsbee, at Eli to the nth , J.R.'s Book Reviews , and Ms. Yingling Reads (and many more--full list at Eli to the nth above) A Mixture of Mischief (Love Sugar Magic #3) at alibrarymama and Charlotte's Library (and many more--see either of the links above for the full blog tour) Monster Slayer, by Brian Patten and Chris Riddell, at Book Murmuration The Mulberry Tree,...

FOODFIC: Please Welcome Elizabeth Blake, Author of Pride, Prejudice & Poison

My Jane Austen Society cozy mysteries are set in Yorkshire, England.  Erin Coleridge and her best friend Farnsworth Appleby are British, as are most of the other characters in Pride, Prejudice and Poison .  So they’re all eating English food. British food was a joke when I was growing up in Ohio – think bland, overcooked vegetables, stodgy meat pies and gloppy, tasteless puddings.  By the time I was twelve, I had memorized the famous Monty Python sketch about spam. No.  No, no, no.  That is not the Britain I know.  In fact, when I think of the United Kingdom, I think of the food.  We had fresh roasted vegetables and coconut shrimp skewers in Bath, grilled fish with ginger and duck pie in Oxford, smoked trout with endive in Edinburgh, and chicken tikka masala where it was actually invented in Glasgow – the Shish Mahal, and they have a charming origin story.  (By the way, chicken tikka masala is now widely considered one of the national dishes of U...

A Mixture of Mischief (Love Sugar Magic #3), by Anna Meriano (blog tour)

A Mixture of Mischief (Walden Pond Press, February 4, 2020) is the third and final book of Anna Meriano's Love Sugar Magic series, that tells the story of how Leo, the youngest daughter in a family of magical baking burjas, finds her own gifts for magic and her own place in her family. Leo, still fed up about her place as the youngest sister (there are four older ones), is chomping at the bit to learn all she can about the magic that makes her family's bakery so successful.  Finally, her mother is starting to teach her, but before she can relax and enjoy being a dependable part of the bakery, dark clouds appear.  A rival bakery is about to open in town, and her family's magical heirlooms, part of what makes their baking magic work, start to go missing. But most disturbing at all is the appearance in her life of her father's father, who abandoned his family when he found they hadn't inherited his magic.  Her grandfather has discovered that Leo's' magical gif...

The Good Hawk, by Joseph Elliott

The Good Hawk , by Joseph Elliott (Walker Books US, January 2020), is a magical version of early Scottish history (9th century-ish), with tons of heart and lots of violence that tells of two teens desperately trying to save their kidnapped kin. 15-year-old Agatha takes her job as Hawk very seriously, patrolling the walls of her clan's island home, always on the lookout for danger.  Though many are dismissive of her abilities (she seems to have Down's Syndrome) she knows she's a good Hawk.  She has a special gift, too, one she keeps hidden--she can communicate with animals.  Then one night she makes a mistake, and fires a burning arrow at one of her own clan's boats, and she's no longer allowed to be a hawk. Her friend Jaime, always anxious, a thinker rather than a doer, was assigned to be an Angler, though he gets seasick. For reasons he doesn't understand, the clan has chosen him for another role--he must marry a girl from a nearby clan, though his own people h...