Book Rec of the Day 5/14-5/17/2008

ENDS OF THE EARTH

Kavenna follows in the many paths of travelers who have been fascinated and impelled by the idea of Thule, a land ever distant, always beyond a horizon, receding and impossibly beautiful. Beginning in Scotland and continuing into Greenland, Iceland, and Norway, the author explores the spirit of travel, the insatiable desire to find distant lands, and the magnificence of the places she goes. Kirkus Reviews called The Ice Museum “a lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.”

THE ICE MUSEUM: IN SEARCH OF THE LOST LAND OF THULE, by Joanna Kavenna (Viking, 2006)

ROMANCE ME

Meg Cabot, the creator of the Princess Diaries books, has crafted, in Boy Meets Girl, a delightful and playful romance with a witch of a boss known as T.O.D. (Tyrannical Office Despot), a sweet dessert-cart lady, a young lawyer named Mitch, and, of course, our heroine, Kate Mackenzie, an idealistic young lady working at the New York Journal. Told through office memos, e-mails, instant messages, and other media favored by modern young women, Kate’s girl-meets-boy story makes a winning and delightful novel.

BOY MEETS GIRL, by Meg Cabot (HarperCollins, 2004)

CLASSIC

It’s May. The roses are beginning to climb, the earth is awakening again—it’s the perfect time for some Colette. In this volume of collected autobiographical writings, the 20th-century iconoclast and sensualist reveals the threads that run through all her writing: her relationship with her mother, Sido; her love of the earth and nature; an intensely feminine, passionate view of the world and people. You can hear the bees buzzing and the sea sighing in these perfumed pages.

EARTHLY PARADISE: COLETTE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, DRAWN FROM THE WRITINGS OF HER LIFETIME, translated from the French by Herma Briffault; edited by Robert Phelps (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966)

SERIES FAVORITES

Miri Cheney is the youngest and wisest of the “Sisters of Faire Isle,” a group of mystical women. Trying to find peace and healing in her ancestral home, she is nevertheless forced to participate in a quest for a mysterious, powerful, and sinister woman known as the Silver Rose. Her partner in this treacherous endeavor is none other than the witch hunter Simon Aristide, a man she does not trust yet inevitably desires. A rich and dramatic mix of fantasy and history, this third book in the Sisters of Faire Isle series will have romance readers hungry for more.

THE SILVER ROSE, by Susan Carroll (Ballantine Books, 2006)