One of my plans for 2019 is to make time to read more books. My post-NaNoWriMo December book binge* got me off to a great start – I devoured five books, which was bliss 💕📚🌟 I did that again in January, and in February too. Such bliss!
FEBRUARY BOOKS
Some of my February books were short reads, but I figure it’s a short month, right? 🙂 💕
This month I had a book club meeting on faery tale retellings, so I started with the novel Enchant: Beauty and the Beast Retold by awesome Perth author Demelza Carlton, which is full of magic and adventure, with a wonderful twist. I loved her Fly: Goose Girl Retold too, and look forward to reading more from her wonderful Romance a Medieval Fairytale series (25 books and counting!)… 💜
I adored re-reading Kate Forsyth’s seven gorgeous retellings in Vasilisa the Wise and Other Tales of Brave Young Women, illustrated by the amazing Lorena Carrington. Here the young women at the centre of the stories are brave, resourceful, clever and kind – and they all save themselves or their sisters, not waiting around for a prince to rescue them. I can’t wait for the next in the series, The Buried Moon and Other Tales of Bright Young Women (you can pre-order here). And right now I’m reading another one of Kate’s novels, Dancing On Knives, for my March reading month… 💚
I also loved Juliet Marillier’s novella Beautiful, from the fantasy anthology Aurum, which is based on the faery tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon. (Beautiful has just been nominated for best fantasy novella at the Aurealis Awards, while the absolutely gorgeous Blackthorn & Grim series is nominated for the Sara Douglass Book Series Award. Winners will be announced May 4…) And I’m so excited that Juliet has expanded the novella into a full-length novel, focusing on one of the other characters, who I can’t wait to follow on her adventures! It will be out at the end of May as an audiobook exclusive, and I can’t wait! 💛
I supported the Kickstarter campaign for The Adventurous Princess and Other Feminist Fairy Tales, which was written and illustrated by Canberra artist Erin-Claire Barrow, a fellow Australian Fairy Tale Society member. And it is wonderful. It includes retellings of nine traditional faery tales with a feminist twist, all beautifully illustrated. It will be officially launched in late March – you can check it out here. ❤️
And I really loved DL Richardson’s magical YA novel One Little Spell. About Ruby, the singer in an all-girl band who is in love with her small town’s misunderstood bad boy, it was sad, touching, funny and wonderful, all at once, with a dose of ghostly magic and a great twist… Not much writing got done over these days, as I had to know what happened. What harm can one little spell do? Plenty if you’re not a witch. 💕
Funnily enough, although this wasn’t planned, all five books are by Aussie authors!
And March is off to a great start too, with Lamp Black, Wolf Grey by Paula Brackston, Bury the Living by Jodi McIsaac, which were both awesome, and now Dancing On Knives by Kate Forsyth (I finally found my copy, after putting it “somewhere safe” when I bought it a while back, doh!)…
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JANUARY BOOKS
First up was one of my Christmas presents from my sweet hubby, the wonderful Blood Communion by Anne Rice. It’s the new Lestat book, and it was like visiting old friends, and meeting a few new ones, and I was totally swept away in the mystery and intrigue – and that heart-stopping, OMG! moment… (No spoilers!) Anne has always been one of my favourite authors. I love the way she writes, and the beauty, magic and history she weaves through her books. (She could also be the reason I favour long and lush sentences in my books too, ha ha!)
Then I read To Nowhere and Back by Margaret J Anderson, the author of one of my favourite childhood books, Searching For Shona. It’s full of mystery and magic, and a different kind of time-slip adventure, and I loved it. Hooray for the publishing revolution that has made so many old books available again! (There are a lot of typos, I guess from scanning in the original books, but they didn’t take me out of the story too much.) I also bought Margaret’s In the Keep of Time and In the Circle of Time, time-slip novels set in magical Scotland, and am looking forward to them.
Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints by PJ Brackston is the first of a very different series by one of my favourite authors, so I was curious to try it. Admittedly her Paula Brackston witchy historical fantasies are more my thing (I love love love The Winter Witch, The Silver Witch, The Witch’s Daughter and others), but this fun cosy/mystery/hilarious adventure is laugh out loud funny, and clever, and intriguing enough that I stayed up til after 3am (oops!) to find out who, how any why. Lots of fun! (And yes, it’s that Gretel…)
My favourite for the month (I know, a big call given Lestat!) was A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, which I devoured without pause. Not much work got done that week – and not much sleep was had either – there were a few staying-up-til-3am nights. I absolutely loved it, and can’t wait for the rest of the books to arrive – although it’s probably a good thing that they’re being posted, so I can get some work done in the meantime 🙂
And for our February discussion at the Australia Fairy Tale Society, an early Australian tale was chosen, The Magic Gun, from the early 1900s book Fairy Tales Told In the Bush, a collection by Sister Agnes. It’s long out of print, and out of copyright, so you can read the book here… Just remember that it was a very different time – the portrayal of Aboriginal leader William Barak in The Magic Gun is awful. Yet in reading the story, we all researched him, and learned about this important ngurungaeta (clan leader), activist, artist, liaison and real-life hero, who we may not have heard of otherwise – you can read about him and his achievements here. I much preferred some of the other stories in the book, and also loved going down the rabbit hole of early Australian fairy tales and finding many more, like The Two Fairies in Tales For Young Australia, the sweet but awfully girls-should-be-obedient Mr Bunyip, or, Mary Somerville’s Ramble, and Fairy Tales, Fables and Legends by Mrs Beatrice Wilcken, amongst many others. Want to venture down the rabbit hole too? The National Library of Australia have collected and preserved so many, which you can read online…
What do the early stories of your country tell you about yourself and the changing world?
* In December I read and absolutely loved:
Return of the Witch by Paula Brackston.
The Sparrow Sisters by Ellen Herrick.
The Night Garden by Lisa Van Allen.
The Other Side of Me by KA Last.
The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston.
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