Recommended Reads

“Marry, we live in perilous times.”
One of my first thoughts when I started reading The Lady Elizabeth, Alison Weir’s second novel, was thank god I’m not Mary Tudor. Before earning history’s dubious distinction as “Bloody Mary,” she suffered heaps of humiliation from her father, Henry VIII, who ticked off the Holy Roman Empire, discarded Mary’s [...]

I couldn’t let the week pass by without mentioning that September 15th (recently gone) was Agatha Christie’s birthday. She was born in Torquay, Devon on the English Channel in 1890, and had she lived, she’d be celebrating her 118th.

Knee-deep in my research into the life of Agatha Christie, I discovered that high among the list of authors she most admired was Wilkie Collins. I had never read him, but if Agatha saw something in him, I figured I might, too.
I decided to give him a go with The Moonstone, published in 1868. In [...]

So it’s with school days and book reports in mind that I highly recommend Mary Tudor: Courageous Queen or Bloody Mary?, by Jane Buchanan. It’s among the latest in Scholastic’s “A Wicked History” series, an excellent line-up of biographies of historical figures tailored to a ‘tween audience.

Daphne, the latest novel by British writer Justine Picardie, artfully begs the question: Where would we be without our literary forbears — without the giants, like the Brontës, the Jameses, and even, perhaps, the du Mauriers?