National Book Festival
Encouraged by Julia's belief that I would be found wandering around the National Mall, hopelessly lost, I headed out to join the other tens of thousands of book lovers at the Library of Congress's...
Something to look forward to...
Two of our favorite Wordcandy YA authors have new books scheduled for the spring:Peter Abrahams has announced that the third book in his excellent Echo Falls mystery series will be called Into the...
Hooked, by Jane May
As our longtime readers know, we here at Wordcandy rarely turn down a re-told fairytale, even when it’s just another teen-girl-friendly version of Cinderella. We’re particularly excited when the fairytale in question is an unusual one, which is why we were all a-flutter over Jane May’s Hooked, a modern retelling of The Fisherman and His Wife...
The Sweet, Terrible, Glorious Year I Truly, Completely, Lost It, by Lisa Shanahan
I don’t know much about Australian entertainment. My knowledge of their popular culture is limited to Strictly Ballroom, a single episode of Kath & Kim I caught in England, and an Australian romance novel that I read a few years ago, which featured such outdated sexual politics that I originally thought it was written in the sixties...
It's that time of year again
Welcome to Banned Books Week!Looking for a banned book to read? Lucky for you, there's no reason to leave the house: half the childhood classics on your bookshelf have been banned or challenged ...
The Dead Guy Interviews, by Michael A. Stusser
I still have my battered middle school copy of DK Publishing's Chronicle of America. It’s held together with duct tape and prayers, but I’m going to keep it forever. The Chronicle was a massive ...
Odds and ends
Please note that if you missed out on the season premiere of Gossip Girl last week, don’t worry: iTunes has the pilot episode available for free download.CNN.com is featuring a list of strange and...
Manga releases galore
I’ve been having some irritating manga experiences lately, so I'm happy to see that there will be volumes of all three of my favorite mangas coming out in the next few weeks:1. Volume 13 of The W...
Sequel news
We've had about a zillion search string hits this month from people looking for information on the sequel to Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy. So here's a compilation of what (little) we know:1. T...
History Lesson for Girls, by Aurelie Sheehan
Aurelie Sheehan writes with delicate, lyrical precision, her characters are memorable and three-dimensional, her sense of time and place imbues every page... and if she'd shown the tiniest bit of self-restraint...
East Coast does O.C.
Have you been feeling the lack of crazy fashion, spoiled teens, social outcasts, trendy music, underage drinking, awkwardly flirtatious "banter", and brooding underdogs? Well, buck up, 'cause it'...
Nora returns!
Well, autumn is rollin' in, so it must be time for another Nora Roberts trilogy. Her upcoming novel Blood Brothers is due out on November 27th. Here's the publisher's description:In the small vi...
I covet...
We've blogged before about Penguin's Graphics Classics reprints, but their recent edition of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers is so awesome that it's worthy of its own post:Dumas's story is ...
Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr
Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr’s debut novel, is a YA gothic fantasy that falls somewhere between Holly Black’s gritty, atmospheric fairy tales and Stephenie Meyer’s angst-filled Twilight series. Marr’s book has its weak spots, but this modern Tam Lin adaptation is more than entertaining enough to overcome them...
Beauty soothes (my sinuses)
I have a brutal head cold today, so, rather than posting the book review that I promised on our newsletter (trust me, nobody wants to see me edit things while under the influence of cold medicine)...
Wear 'em with pride.
Check out this cute Madeline shirt, available for a paltry (okay, not really) $24.50:Aside: This has no literary significance, and I don't think I'd actually wear it, but I also really like their ...
Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007)
We were very sorry to hear that Madeleine L'Engle, author of the mind-bogglingly awesome children's classic A Wrinkle in Time, died last Thursday. Ms. L'Engle lived to a ripe old eighty-eight, an...
An Infamous Army, by Georgette Heyer
It's been decades since American audiences have seen decent editions of Georgette Heyer’s books. While British readers were enjoying the beautiful reprints Arrow Books released a few years ago, A...
Who knows?
We're always looking for new and different ways to store books here at Wordcandy, and this Invisible Shelf seems like an interesting possibility. Visually, I love it, and I can see how it would be...
The Spanish Bow, by Andromeda Romano-Lax
In 2001, journalist Andromeda Romano-Lax began researching a nonfiction account of the life of the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. While Casals's history was fascinating, as Romano-Lax did further research she discovered that there was another story—actually, several other stories—she wanted to tell...
To Scotland, With Love, by Karen Hawkins
Karen Hawkins has written another story in her MacLean Family series--this one's called To Scotland, With Love, and it's about a thousand times better than her previous effort...
Mysterious.
I've been wondering: how do Korean Internet novels work, exactly? I was totally unfamiliar with this term until a few years ago, but then I started watching K-dramas, and they're all about the in...
Lucky, lucky English people.
The Sadler's Wells Theatre in Islington is staging a ballet adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones's novel Black Maria*. Here's their official description:Thirteen year old Mig’s family head to Cranbury...