Fiction

Love on the Spectrum, Austen Style

The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

June 22, 2026 by ElCicco 2 Comments

I enjoyed this installment of Gray’s Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney Mysteries even more than the previous book, The Late Mrs. Willoughby. I think in large part this is because the main characters and the setting for this one are straight from Pride and Prejudice, featuring a couple of my favorite characters: Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins. After two successful sleuthing adventures, Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney have returned to their own lives. Jonathan is back at Pemberly with his parents Lizzie and Darcy, while […]

The gang’s all here!

The Late Mrs. Willoughby: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

June 17, 2026 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

My local bookstore recently had a table full of Claudia Gray’s Jane Austen-based detective series on sale, so I picked up a couple, not realizing that I was starting with books 2 and 3. That’s a little bit of a shame, and I might circle back around to the first book eventually, but I still find this introduction to Gray’s series most entertaining. Gray has taken Austen’s best known and beloved characters from across several of her novels and created extended families for them, including […]

It’s all fun and games until the gods show up

All Hail Chaos: Time of Iron Book 2 by Sarah Rees Brennan

June 12, 2026 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

All Hail Chaos is the sequel to Long Live Evil, which I reviewed favorably last year. At the time, I thought this sequel would end the story, but it looks like we are in for a Time of Iron Book 3, and there is a doozy of a cliffhanger at the end of book 2. My overall impression of All Hail Chaos is that it was … fine. Honestly, I felt like the pacing was kind of slow, and some of the more interesting character […]

A made-for-social-media mystery

Strange Houses by Uketsu

June 3, 2026 by denesteak Leave a Comment

Strange Houses was the first book I read this year, back in January, and it has taken me entirely too long to just sit down and jot down my thoughts about it. Part of it is because I was very disappointed with how promising the premise was and how it fully deflated by the time I got to the end, so much so that now six months later, I’m honestly struggling to remember how it ended. The other reason why it took so long is […]

Accept the things you cannot change or change the things you cannot accept?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

May 19, 2026 by ElCicco Leave a Comment

The Memory Police is an unsettling novel. The descriptions I read in advance made it sound a bit like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. It is a dystopian novel, and it does involve the authoritarian suppression of knowledge and personal freedom, but while I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as “political” science fiction, The Memory Police is not exactly that. The most disturbing acts of suppression in The Memory Police come from within the people themselves. The story is set on an island where some […]

A lovely choice for Mother’s Day but get your hankies out

Foster by Claire Keegan

May 10, 2026 by ElCicco 2 Comments

This novel, which is barely 100 pages long, packs an emotional wallop. Set in rural coastal Ireland, Foster is the story of an unnamed girl, age unknown (I’m guessing 7 or 8-ish), who abruptly finds herself living with an aunt and uncle one summer. In these few pages, Claire Keegan beautifully reveals the pain and longing of this child and of her relatives, and the roots of each. The novel opens with this girl and her father getting in the car on a Sunday morning […]

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