Why I bought the book: Magic Lessons is a prequel to the book Practical Magic.  I am ashamed to admit I had never read Practical Magic (which I have now remedied along with book two in the series The Rules of Magic and a third will be out later this year The Book of Magic ). I will likely purchase her entire back list and add her to my top favorite writer list. I had enjoyed the 1998 movie with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Magic Lessons traces the origin of the Owens bloodline starting with Maria Owens in the 1600s and her mother Rebecca. Rebecca leaves her daughter Maria with a woman named Hannah Owens, so she can chase love. Thus begins the Owens women's fraught entanglement with romantic love which seems doomed to bring them sorrow even as they help other women with their relationship woes. Hannah teaches Maria to always love someone who loves you back. However, like her wild mother, Maria falls for a weak man who leaves her pregnant and alone in the world. Maria follow...

As a reader I have always enjoyed mystery series. That started with the Grand Dame of mystery Agatha Christie with her delightful characters Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Then it was John D. McDonald and the Travis McGee series. A few years later I stumbled upon the 87th Precinct Series by Ed McBain, the alter-ego of Evan Hunter, and that's what stirred my interest in police procedural mysteries. There are so many other series that I've enjoyed. Sue Grafton's alphabet series with Kinsey Millhone. Dennis Lehane's series with Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, a much too short series for me. Louise Penney' s series with Armand Gamache and a whole cast of intriguing characters. Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series set in Bangkok that recently ended, much to the dismay of this reader and many others. For a reader, when a series ends, it's like we've lost a whole family. That's especially true if there've been a lot of books, or even just...

When I first started writing, I tried a mystery series starring Sylvia Thorn and Willie Grisseljon, a sister and brother who were older. In their 60s, as a matter of fact. Their elderly parents are still alive and active as well. Writing The Prairie Grass Murders and The Desert Hedge Murders was fun, but I wanted to try a thriller, and historical fiction, and short stories, so off I went to dabble in a variety of genres. I also read in almost every genre, including non-fiction, but when I’m looking for mysteries, I start with my go-to favorites among the authors of the Rocky Mountain states, most of them in Colorado. With all the excellent writers here, one hardly needs to search anywhere else in the country. I couldn’t begin to mention them all in one blog post, so I’m going to talk about just a few of the ones I’ve read in 2020. My want-to-read list for 2021 is is even longer. Shannon Baker Shannon lives in Arizona these days, but she spent lots of time in the state of Colorado and ...

My husband gifted me a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas a few years ago. He had jumped on the Kindle bandwagon a few years before that. I was still stubbornly clinging to paper over plastic. Then we moved from the Midwest to Florida which involved serious downsizing. So the majority of our massive book collection had to go. Parting was such sweet sorrow. Finite Folio Cover My Kindle sat unused for a while other than to purchase a cover that made it look like a book. I gradually added to my Kindle library. Soon, I had more than one page of options and became frustrated until I learned how to create collections, which you can learn more about here . Still, I was not content. I missed actual bookshelves with books neatly lined up by author and series in order. As my Kindle content grew, I tired of searching through books I had already read. Around this time, on an unrelated note, Apple completely changed its Itunes store to favor streaming. Thank goodness I still had two iPODs and my musi...

Unless you were already living in a war zone, a global pandemic is the probably scariest thing you have experienced in a very long time. If you were already prone to depression and anxiety, there is nothing like a plague to ramp up the tension setting to high. It is okay to feel scared and frozen. To wonder why you should bother to write a book when the world feels like it is ending. What's the point? Who can afford to buy it? How could you possibly launch it? Are publishers even accepting new works? The fact is books are getting many of us through this difficult time. Book sales are up.  Some are reading dystopian books for reassurance. Fictional worlds survived. People carried on. In many countries, dictators are in power and authoritarianism is on the rise. We may be inspired by heroes who fought to overturn corruption. The same applies to historical books set in war time and disaster thrillers. There is comfort in knowing someone somewhere managed to survive natural disasters, ...

With life on hold, I have had endless hours to catch up on my To Be Read pile. Quite a few of the Fantasy YA novels are about dystopian societies. As I read and listened to the daily news, a few things came to mind about story building a dystopian novel. 1. Dystopian novels often minimize or ignore the range of responses from people. As I watch the arguments over quarantine, masks, and social distancing play out, it is obvious there are more than two sides to the characters dealing with the overall story problem. There are bands of resistance that want different things. 2. I am not certain that the level of dread and panic is presented enough in books. There is a lemming effect too, where people herd and move in different directions as a pod. How do your characters deal with their panic? What soothes them? What traumatizes them? 3. Stakes are crucial to every story, but should be the highest alert level in a dystopian thriller. 4. There are shades of gray. Even well-meaning b...

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Charles Dicken's words have never been more relevant as we endure a worldwide pandemic with widespread quarantines and stay at home orders. I have read a many dystopian novels and it certainly feels like we are living in one. In most dystopian novels, humans survive. Whether we continue to thrive or wither is on us. It can bring out the best in people, and the worst. Here is a list of ten books inspired by outbreaks. 1 .  Andromeda Strain   (1970) by Michael Crichton is by far the scariest tale I remember from my childhood. Images of people dissolving into dust stuck with me. A military space probe brings microbes back to earth, setting off an outbreak. Scientists race to understand and contain the threat. They keep it secret with total news blackouts. Of course back then we didn't have 24/7 news feeds or social media. I never looked at our space missions the same way again. 2 .  A Journal of the Plag...

The Black Pill L.J. Sellers File Size: 890 KB Print Length: 262 pages Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited Publisher: Spellbinder Press (February 11, 2020) Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC Language: English ASIN: B0842YWM9W BOOK BLURB -  Agent Dallas goes undercover to bring down a pack of online sexual predators, but the secrets she uncovers are more horrific than anyone imagined. A body wrapped in plastic turns up in the middle of the road—with no ID and no viable explanation. The pressure builds when Detective Jackson must also locate a missing woman that few people seem to know. Fearing for the kidnapped woman’s life, Jackson follows her ex-boyfriend, but the effort backfires in a deadly way. Across the country, FBI Agent Jamie Dallas takes on a dangerous undercover assignment—tracking a sexual predator who brags about his assaults in a perverse dark-web forum. Dallas travels to Jackson’s hometown and discovers that her target’s crimes are just the opening salvo...

Since we are focusing on the humorous side of things this month at the Blood Red Pencil, it's only right that I provide some light-hearted reading possibilities for your consideration. Let's start with mysteries (because I am all about the mysteries). Stop, You're Killing Me! Has a great list of humorous mysteries . The list is alphabetical by author, starting with Douglas Adams and ending with Sue Owens Wright.  Parker Memorial Library (no relation!) in Massachusetts includes a list of humorous mysteries for you to peruse.  Listopia over at Goodreads has a Humorous Mysteries list also (of course!), with 227 books.   But that's NOTHING compared to the 2,916 books on the Listopia Humorous Romance Books list.  You can also check out the list over at Fiction Obsessed on Best Funny Romance Novels to Read . Image by Prawny from Pixabay To building family bonding over belly laughs, you might want to glance through one of the following lists...

It may be the end of July, but the reading never stops. For your browsing pleasure, please check out the lists below. You'll probably find plenty to add to your TBR (to-be-read) virtual or paper-based stacks of books for the rest of summer and beyond. The Booklist Reader has a list of authors and books to tackle for various July events, including Canada Day, the Fourth of July, P.T. Barnum's birthday, and Bastille Day. (Note: the list is nine years old, but hey, some authors never go out of date.) BookBrowse lists their Best book for July 2019 . You'll find all kinds and flavors here. Click on a cover to learn more about a particular book. For the Fourth of July, the Cincinnati Public Library has recommendations for all ages and tastes. To stretch the timeframe a bit, Listopia's Best Children's Books about Summer provides plenty for small fry to devour—251 books in all. Now, to mysteries, because that's my favorite genre.  The Cozy Mystery List Blog ...

It's JUNE, the start of summer and perhaps a little more reading time for us all. If you delve into this list of June holidays , there's a mountain of holiday themes to plan your reading around. So, without further ado, here are a few holiday-themed June reading lists. Earlier this month, BRP blogger Maryann Miller offered up some Father's Day reads . Here are a few additional lists to consider: The Cozy Mystery List has a goodly sample right here .  Mystery Fanfare never lets me down, and won't let you down either. Here are some offerings for Father's Day .   Goodreads Listopia has a Fathers: Good, Bad and Surrogate list of books to consider.  Another Listopia has 260 picture books about fathers for the younger set.   Now, how about the rest of the month? Well, June is Gay Pride month. Image by Jasmin Sessler from Pixabay Hold your rainbow flag high with pride with these book lists: The McQuade Library created a Listopia of the LGBTQIA ...

As we are well into spring in most parts of the United States and Canada, our thoughts turn to gardens and lawns and flowers that bloom in May. I remember early May was the time for me to plant pansies for my mother as a Mother's Day present. Photo by Maryann Miller She loved those little "people" flowers with the smile she always saw in them. The smile that would elicit one from her, even during the most difficult times of our lives. And there were plenty of difficult times. It was an annual event - this gifting of pansies - and the flower soon became a binding force between us and my sister. Today, as we look ahead to Mother's Day - our 5th without her - my sister and I will think of pansies and cardinals - the two things from nature that Mother most loved - and that will bring us comfort. For many years, I wanted to write a book about my mother, who came out of a horrible childhood and challenging adulthood to become one of the strongest women I've eve...

The many faces of April, from April Fool's Day to Easter to "April showers bring May flowers." Claude Shafer   (The Tacoma Times), Public Domain   As we close in on the end of April, I figure we can't turn our backs on the month without a quick look at what books might be out there with an April Fool's theme. Let's start with mysteries. (After all, mysteries are basically designed to mess with readers' minds, and then jump out, shouting "Fooled you!" at the end.) We have this handful from the Cozy Mystery List . Hurray for Janet Rudolph, whose Mystery Fanfare blog always comes through for holiday/special day reads. April's Fool's is no exception .  Moving away from murder and mayhem... The blog Borrow.Read.Repeat. offers " Laugh-out-loud reads " for April Fool's Day. Listopia has Hoover Library's Insatiable Reads' April Fools (It's Always Good to Laugh) list, including Howl: A collection of the ...