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Review: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James was literally DOA for me. It really tears me up when I have to write and unfavorable review, but I do have to call them like I see them, it’s only fair to my reads, fans, and authors. For me, Death Comes to Pemberley was a flatline. I really wanted to like it but I just could never really get into it which makes me very sad. With every page that I read I was hoping it would improve but I found it confusing at times and the characters flat. James begins with giving the ‘ridiculous short version’ recap of the original Jane…
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Review: The Deception of the Emerald Ring (Pink Carnation #3) by Lauren Willig
Letty Alsworthy has an appalling nasty habit of being whisked way by seemingly innocent carriages! What was it about her that made everyone within grabbing distance want to and act upon the sudden urge to toss her an anything with wheels, one would be abductor in particular–Lord Geoffrey Pinchingdale Snipe. In Lauren Willig’s latest Pink Carnation romantic spy thriller series, The Deception of the Emerald Ring, Letty Alsworthy finds herself in a precarious situation…her sister Mary is secretly engaged to Lord Pinchingdale and plotting to elope with him. Letty discovers the plot moments before Mary literally flies out the window right along with her reputation….Letty manages to get to Lord Pinchingdale’s…
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Review: The Masque of the Black Tulip (Pink Carnation #2) by Lauren Willig
If the Pink Carnation left you feeling a little wilted and longing to drink in the next flowery caped crusader….look no further, Lauren Willig’s The Masque of the Black Tulip, is sure to quench any lingering thirst readers had! Ravishing and bewitching, the whole Regency era upper-class turned spies with cute horticultural names thing is a force to be reckoned with…these books are simply amazing. I am reading them as part of the Regency & Victorian Reads Challenge over at the Royal Review’s blog. As I was about thirty or so pages out from finishing the first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, I had to stop myself,…
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Review: The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (Pink Carnation #1) by Lauren Willig
I feel like I just entered the most interesting florist shop in London. I am surrounded by flowers….the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, and of course the Pink Carnation….but wait I’m in a book! What the deuce are all these flowers doing in a book?? Granted…it’s decidedly less fragrant in the book than in a florist shop but still–what the deuce is going on here? Oh wait….I am reading Lauren Willig’s novel The Secret History of the Pink Carnation! Pink Carnation is just the beginning of the flowery Regency era series. We begin with Amy, born in France she and her mother flee the French Revolution across the Channel to…
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The Lit Bitch has entered the 2012 Regency & Victorian Reads Challenge
Reading challenge #2 for 2012 has been entered! As I mentioned before in my other post, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting my entries for various challenges here as I sign up and I will also have a special page/section devoted to my entries which will have lists of books I plan on reading. As per usual I’ll post my reviews throughout the year and add the buttons on my sidebars. So here is the second challenge sign up of 2012: the Regency & Victorian Reads Challenge hosted by The Royal Reviews. For more details about my entry and goals please see my the Regency & Victorian Reads Challenge If you are…
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Review: The Mischief of the Mistletoe (Pink Carnation #7) by Lauren Willig
Tis the season for purloined pudding! Christmas pudding, bonnets, love, and mystery are all literary in the air in Lauren Willig’s book The Mischief of the Mistletoe. This book is #4.2 in Willig’s wildly popular Pink Carnation series. I saw this book advertised on Goodreads a few weeks ago and fell in love with the cover and….suddenly I had to read it! So I picked up a copy and then I saw the Christmas Spirit Reading Challenge hosted by the True Book Addict and suddenly I couldn’t wait for it to be Christmas season so I could read this book! Biding my time, I started the book the day the challenge started and finished the book…
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Review: Murder at Mansfield Park by Lynne Shepherd
Hold on to your bonnets, there’s been a Murder at Mansfield Park! In this charming Jane Austen spin off, author Lynne Shepherd takes a classic English novel and turns it into a classic ‘who done it’. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the only Austen novel I have not read ironically, for some reason it just never appealed to me. Everyone says that Fanny Price is the worse Austen heroine ever, though I cannot claim my own opinion of the original Fanny Price, I can say with confidence I didn’t care for the Shepherd version of Price in this book which was the obvious point of her novel. I’ve only read a…
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Review: Through a Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen
For my birthday a few months ago, my sister got me this book. Both her and I have very similar literary tastes so when she got me this book I was very excited to start reading it–I totally trust her literary judgement, since she is a librarian she knows all the good books/authors :). She had heard lots of good things about it and said she thought it was part of a series but wasn’t sure. She knew the author had written other historic works such as Before Versailles: A Novel of Louis XIV which I saw featured on Goodreads around the same time. Karleen Koen has written four books, Dark Angles,…
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Review: Emma by Jane Austen
I finally find myself at the end of another book and at my computer long enough to compose a post. I just finished Emma by Jane Austen last night as part of the Victorian Literature Reading Challenge hosted by Subtle Melodrama. As the challenge outlines, the books must have been written during the Victorian era (1837-1901) or contain Victorian era thoughts/values which Austen does….though Austen wrote more in the Georgian era/ Regency era (1811-1817) her concepts and ideals were generally Victorian so I was happy I could include some of her novels as part of the challenge. Of course I have read Emma before, once in high school and once as part of…