Recommended Reading

by Susanna Ives

Ack! I’m late getting recommended readings posted. Once again, I have consulted my mother, the wonder librarian and my cousin H, the world’s best bookstore manager. Both women are incurable book addicts. Here are their latest finds. All the blurbs come from www.goodreads.com. Happy reading!

Mom’s recommendations:

Snakewoman from Little Egypt, by Robert Hellenga

On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snakehandling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She's been serving a five-year sentence for shooting, but not killing, her husband, the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, after he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes.

Sunny and Jackson become lovers, but they're pulled in different directions. Sunny, drawn to science and eager to put her snake handling past behind her, enrolls at the university. Jackson, however, takes a professional interest in the religious ecstasy exhibited by the snakehandlers. Push comes to shove in a novel packed with wit, substance, and emotional depth.

The First Assistant: A Continuing Tale from Behind the Hollywood Curtain, by Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare

In The First Assistant, Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare have again joined forces to take a wry and hilarious look at the wheeling, dealing, schmoozing, and snubbing that make Hollywood the cutthroat capital of the world. Readers are hungry for more-and The First Assistant is just the romp into the red-carpet world that they crave.

My mother says if Bridget Jones worked in Hollywood agency she would Lizzie Miller.

H’s recommendations.

A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift, by Kate Griffin

H liked the book better than she expected to, and she expected to like it a lot.

Two years after his untimely death, Matthew Swift finds himself breathing once again, lying in bed in his London home.

Except that it's no longer his bed, or his home. And the last time this sorcerer was seen alive, an unknown assailant had gouged a hole so deep in his chest that his death was irrefutable...despite his body never being found.

He doesn't have long to mull over his resurrection though, or the changes that have been wrought upon him. His only concern now is vengeance. Vengeance upon his monstrous killer and vengeance upon the one who brought him back.

A Companion to Wolves, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear.

H read this book five times.

A Companion to Wolves is the story of a young nobleman, Isolfr, who is chosen to become a wolfcarl -- a warrior who is bonded to a fighting wolf. Isolfr is deeply drawn to the wolves, and though as his father's heir he can refuse the call, he chooses to go.

The people of this wintry land depend on the wolfcarls to protect them from the threat of trolls and wyverns, though the supernatural creatures have not come in force for many years. Men are growing too confident. The wolfhealls are small, and the lords give them less respect than in former years. But the winter of Isolfr's bonding, the trolls come down from the north in far greater numbers than before, and the holding's complaisance gives way to terror in the dark.

Isolfr, now bonded to a queen wolf, Viradechtis, must learn where his honor lies, and discover the lengths to which he will to go when it, and love for his wolf, drive him.