Last week, I posted on History Hoydens about the visual inspiration for The Garden Intrigue, the grounds of Malmaison. On Facebook recently, I was asked to post about a different sort of visual inspiration: my heroine’s clothing. Emma, the heroine of The Garden Intrigue, is at the forefront of the Paris fashion scene. Like her [...]

If you like Downton Abbey, you’ll probably like…. – Eva Ibbotsen’s A Countess Below Stairs, about a Russian noblewoman who becomes a downstairs maid in an English manor house; – Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, about a woman who rises from maid in an Edwardian house to mistress of a financial empire; – [...]

Huge congrats to Rosemary, whose new on-line magazine, Laptop Lit Mag, has just launched! Here’s the magazine’s mission statement: The laptop is a universal symbol of the up and coming generation. It is extremely rare to find a twenty-something without one. We used to go to the library to quench our thirst for a good [...]

This has been a rather eclectic book week for me, spanning a number of genres. – Elizabeth Peters, The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits. I remembered why this one doesn’t make it back into the re-read rotation very frequently. Not that it’s bad– it’s just not up to the level of her others. – Patti [...]

I am so very lucky to be joined on book tour by two of my favorite author friends, Deanna Raybourn and Tasha Alexander. Come see Deanna at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale on Thursday, February 16th– we’ll have champagne and chocolates and lots of copies of both of our books. (If you can’t be there, [...]

Thanks so much to everyone for the wonderful “Very Dorrington Valentine’s Day” titles! Miles and Henrietta would have been thrilled. This wound up being a very tough contest to tally, since almost every title had its partisans, leading to a three way tie for third place. Without further ado, in fourth place we have: – [...]

In addition to the new contest on the Contest page (check it out!), there are some other new features up on the website: – You can find some of the background works that went into creating The Garden Intrigue on the Bibliography page; – the Book Club page has been updated with discussion questions for [...]

Inspired by some comments on my Facebook author page, there’s a new contest up on the Contest page. I’m rather pleased with this one…. It combines both Pink and Jane Austen!

As the publication date of The Garden Intrigue creeps closer, there have been some lovely reviews popping up around the web, from Sassymonkey, the Girls in the Stacks (Stacy, I heart that you heart Emma!), and Once Upon a Romance. Thanks, all! And stay tuned for a “Day in the Life” post on Stitch-Read-Cook next [...]

If you like stories based on fairy tales, you’ll probably like…. – Robin McKinley’s fairy tale remakes, in particular her Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, one of my favorite books of all time. She revisited Beauty and the Beast in a later book, Rose Daughter, as well as tackling [...]