Reading update

I don't know why - I just can't seem to get into the mood for any full-fledged book reviews, so I'll just update. I finished The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, the Oscar Wilde mystery and Murder in Volume 2, along with Buckingham Palace Gardens, the latest in the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series by Anne Perry. All of them were very good - Anne Perry is always good. I was a bit disappointed that Charlotte was hardly in this one at all, but since the murder took place at the palace, their servant, Gracie, was the one who went undercover. The Jane Austen one caught the flavor of the period quite well, as I already said was true of the Oscar Wilde mystery, and it did not end as I expected. (Anyone who is a Jane Austen fan and knows the story on which it's based will know what I expected.) It was suitably tragic, though - I'm not giving anything away since unless you're writing an alternate history (which she wasn't) you can't change what happened.

I'm still working on the other two, along with The Confessions of Fitzwilliam Darcy, another Darcy point-of-view retelling of Pride & Prejudice, which so far is the best one I've read yet. Up to now it was the trilogy by Pamela Aidan, but the weakness of that one was Vol. 2. Evidently she was determined to have three books, and I think she would have been better off with two. Also Bras and Broomsticks, a kind of Jewish girls' Harry Potter - nowhere near the depth of HP, but still very entertaining. (I got that one for the temple library, so naturally I had to check it out.) Another one that's a lot like Harry - though still pretty well-written in its own right so far - is The Tapestry, the first book in a series called The Hound of Rowan. The kid finds out he has magical powers and goes off to a private school that so far, reminds me a lot of Hogwarts. No Dumbledore, though - one point against it.

I ended up closing Mademoiselle Boleyn on the first page, alas. Maybe it was good, but she turned me off immediately by having Anne going off to France with Henry VIII's sister Mary. I think it's pretty well accepted by now that she (Anne) was already in Austria being educated and was sent from there to France, and it seems like an author of historical fiction should be up on the latest research. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe she was supposed to have been sent from there back to England to join Mary and her ladies, but it left a bad taste in my mouth and then the Amazon reviews didn't sound too promising - they seemed to think it was pretty lightweight. I don't have time for things that I'm already pretty sure aren't worth it!

Then I just got my introductory offer from the Scientific American Book Club, as well as all the ones I've gotten from paperbackswap.com. So many books, so little time!