Winners!

by Carol2 Comments
Congratulations to the winners of my Clear Your Shelf Giveaway! Ashley H. - The Thirteen by Susie Moloney Brooke D. - The Yard by Alex Grecian Erma H. - The Kingdom on the Edge of Reality by Gahan Hanmer I'll be mailing them out in the next week or so. I hope you all enjoy them.  ...
Read More
Thursday’s Tale: The Steadfast Tin Soldier

Thursday’s Tale: The Steadfast Tin Soldier

by Carol5 Comments
I'm still looking at some of the Favorite Fairy Tale characters whose stories I haven't read yet. Today's character is the ballerina girl from "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" by Hans Christian Andersen. Many of Andersen's tales are beautifully written but so sad, like this one. On his birthday, a boy receives a set of 25 toy soldiers and arrays them on a table top. One soldier stands on a single leg, having been the last one cast from an old tin spoon. Nearby, he spies a paper lady with a tinsel rose on her dress in front of a cardboard castle. She is a ballerina and is standing on one leg too. The soldier promptly falls in love. That night, when the people are alseep, al the toys wake up, speaking and moving on their own, except the soldier and the ballerina who are both silent and stay in their poses. A goblin pops out of a box and angrily warns the soldier...
Read More
First Paragraphs of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

First Paragraphs of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

by Carol3 Comments
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down— from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. He said to Effie Perine: "Yes, sweetheart?" She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: "There's a girl wants to see you. Her name's Wonderly." "A customer?" "I guess so. You'll want to see her anyway: she's a knockout." I think those first couple of paragraphs introduce the characters rather well. First chapter...
Read More
But I Love Covers, Don’t I?

But I Love Covers, Don’t I?

by Carol15 Comments
Are book covers dead? "No!" I want to yell. "Of course not, don't be ridiculous." They grab my attention, draw me into the book, and make me want to read the story between the covers. They give me a feel for the book, what kind of story it will be. That's what I want to say and thought I believed until I really sat down and thought about it. Some book covers are simply gorgeous; others capture the mood of the story without giving much away; and there are some, a very few, that are simply iconic, that go hand-in-hand with the books themselves; but I just don't think I care about them as much as I used to. I remember the days of walking into the bookstore and just browsing through the stacks, picking up the paperbacks that caught my eye, looking at the cover, turning them over to read the blurb, putting them back or maybe opening them to...
Read More
“Clear Your Shelf” Giveaway

“Clear Your Shelf” Giveaway

by Carol6 Comments
It's time to work on clearing my shelves up a litte. Today, I'm giving away three books to three winners. Enter to win whichever of the books you'd like, or all of them. Entries will be accepted through midnight on June 20th and sorry, but they're open to US mailing addresses only. The Thirteen by Susie Moloney (ARC) "Desperate Housewives" meets "The Witches of Eastwick" in this novel about a woman who returns with her teenage daughter to her childhood home, not knowing that she's stepped back into a community run by a group of witches a Rafflecopter giveaway The Yard by Alex Grecian (ARC)  Victorian London is a cesspool of crime, and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives—known as “The Murder Squad”—to investigate countless murders every month. Created after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, The Murder Squad suffers rampant public contempt. They have failed their citizens. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own . . . one of...
Read More