LeseLust & LeseLiebe

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...

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 (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...

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,...

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 (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 (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...

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book is an older English one-- The Wind Eye , by Robert Westall (upper MG/YA 1976, still in print).  Westall's work ranges from picture books to adult, often exploring how the past hits the present in dark and mysterious ways.  Which is what happens in The Wind Eye.... It begins when a family, comprising a mother and her teenaged son married to a father with two daughters (one a young teen and one a little girl), setting off to the northeast coast of England to stay in the old house the father has just inherited.  They are not a happy family.  The kids get along fine, but the parents are not getting on well at all. And then the past and the present collide.   St. Cuthbert still is a real person to the people of this part of the Northumberland coast, and he becomes so to the kids as well when they find a boat that travels back to his time, taking them out to the island that was his retreat from the world.   Along the way, there's...

Here are the posts about mg fantasy and sci fi that I gleaned in my blog reading this week!  Please let me know if I missed yours. The Reviews Agent Weasel and the Abominable Dr Snow, by Nick East, at Library Girl and Book Boy Agent Weasel and the Fiendish Fox Gang, at Twirling Book Princess The Bootlace Magician, by Cassie Beasley, at Sloth Reads The Haunting, by Lindsey Duga, at Not Acting My Age and Cracking the Cover The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day, by Christopher Edge, at Charlotte's Library Nevertell, by Katherie Orton, at Booktrailers for Kids and YA Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, by Carlos Hernandez, at Sonderbooks Serafina and the Seven Stars, by Robert Beatty, at Good Reads With Rona A Sprinkle of Sorcery, by Michelle Harrison, at Book Craic The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady, by Gerald Morris, at Leaf's Reviews Urchin of the Riding Stars (The Mistmantle Chronicles, Book 1) by M.I. McAllister, at Semicolon Wild and Chance, by Allan Zadoff, at Ms. Yingling Reads...

In my worldview, pizza and beer go together just like peanut butter and jelly. When my friends and I would dig into a meaty concoction filled with sausage and pepperoni, our favorite brews always accompanied the choice. This pairing wasn’t about flavor or the palette; pizza and beer were simply a known pairing. When I went on a trip to Napa Valley to do some research for my book Windstorm , which has winery themes, I was surprised to find dozens of pizza places within Napa Valley, all of which served wine with their pies. While I’d never heard of such a thing, I quickly discovered that Napa Valley does not have ordinary pizza…and they certainly don’t have ordinary wine. Skewered shrimp and tomato pizza? This pairs well with the Sauvignon Blanc from a specific winery. Spinach and artichoke pizza with grilled mushrooms? Try a sweeter wine such as Riesling. Duck pizza braised with barbeque sauce? Try a Merlot. For every type of pizza, there was a wine to accommodate. And what I learned as...

I'm still holding on to the middle grade sci fi/fantasy books of 2019, with a slightly over the top grim determination to read all the ones at hand before the end of January...(fortunately January 2020 is not a huge mg sci fi/fantasy release month, so I'm sure I can catch up on this year's in just a few days of reading!). The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day , by Christopher Edge, is an English import that came out here in the US back in April 2019 (Delecorte), and in 2018 in the UK.  It's a story of sisters caught in an altered reality, with time and space gone wonky, with birthday balloons and tasty food meeting a horror of chaos and despair. It's Maisie's tenth birthday, and her parents are making a huge effort to give her a great party.  The greatness of the party is supposed to make up for the fact that none of her friends are coming.  Maisie in fact has none at all.  She's a home-schooled science and math prodigy, who's never had a chance to socialize ...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know of anything I missed! The Reviews Alien Superstar, by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver, at Good Reads with Rona Boy Band of the Apocalypse, by Tom Nicholl, at Always in the Middle Cog, by Greg van Eekhout, at Sonderbooks The Dark Lord Clementine, by Sarah Jean Horwitz, at Geo Librarian A Dash of Trouble (Sprinkle of Spirits #1), by Anna Meriano, at Leaf's Reviews The Girl who Stole and Elephant, by Nizrana Farook, at Lily and the Fae (I haven't read this myself yet, so not sure it counts as fantasy....) The Girl with the Dragon Heart, by Stephanie Burgis, at Book Criac Lampie and the Children of the Sea, by Annet Schaap, at Whispering Stories The Mystwick School of Musicraft, by Jessica Khoury, at Sharon the Librarian Race to the Sun, by Rebecca Roanhoures, at Ms. Yingling Reads , Book Page , and Bookshelf Fantasies The Red Winter (The Tapestry #5), by Henry H. Neff, at Say What? The Revenge of Magic, by James Riley, at Imagi...