01/16/12: Hither and Yon

Out and about on the internet, there are a few interesting things going on.

Vintage Reels is hosting a Pink Carnation book club. Pop by to discuss your reactions to Pink I– or invite a friend to get started on Pink! One person chosen from the comments section will receive a copy of The Masque of the Black Tulip and a signed bookplate.

Elsewhere on the web, All About Romance is holding their annual reader poll. Vote for favorite tear-jerker, most kick-ass heroine, biggest disappointment, and more. (I love the idea of these polls, but when I sit down to fill them out, I can never remember which books I’ve read were actually 2011 releases.)

Happy holiday Monday!

01/13/12: Praise for GARDEN INTRIGUE!

With only a month to go until Publication Day, RT Book Reviews gave The Garden Intrigue four and a half stars. Even better? The review itself.

Usually, I try to excerpt pithy pieces from reviews, but this one was so good I just have to include the whole paragraph:

“Willig delights time and again with her clever, witty, intelligent and thoughtful Pink Carnation series. The ninth installment retains all the freshness and vitality of the first. Fans, new and old, will savor the mystery, double romance, and the wondrous appearance of the Pink Carnation.”

Thanks, RT! You’ve made my month.

01/11/12: The Book Stash

Today on AAR, there’s a post about book hoarding. It’s the book equivalent of saving the cherry on the top of the cupcake for last: holding books you’re excited about in reserve for some particularly meaningful moment.

This hit home today because I’m finally reading Kate Morton’s The Distant Hours, which I’ve had sitting around for months now, waiting until I’d finished the Kenya book. I did the same with Jennifer Crusie’s Agnes and the Hitman, which lived on a pile in my bedroom for months, awaiting an auspicious moment. Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride and Books Twoand Threeof the Hunger Games trilogy are still in the queue.

I have mixed feelings about book hoarding. On the one hand, sometimes saving that book means that you find it again at just the right moment. Some of my best reading experiences– Susanna Kearsley’s The Rose Garden, Jen Lancaster’s Bitter is the New Black– have been on airplanes, since I so often save books for trips, in that special floaty place way above the ground where my ordinary cares and distractions have no place.

On the other hand, there’s always the danger of over-hype or forgetfulness. Especially with much-praised books, by the time I get around to reading them, expectations are so high that the book suffers by comparison. Often, it’s not the book’s fault at all. It’s just that it was meant to be Special with a capital S, to serve some need outside of itself. Other times, books sit around for so long that by the time I get around to them, I’ve lost interest. It’s the impulse read that catches me: the book purchased on a whim or rediscovered from an even older pile.

Do you hoard books for special occasions?

01/10/12: Contest: Name That Chapter!

The Special Bonus Henrietta and Miles Chapter (or, possibly, novella) is due to appear here just two days before the release of Pink IX, The Garden Intrigue.

There’s just one problem. It needs a title.

As you all know, I tend to get severe writer’s block when it comes to coming up with titles. I’ve got the subtitle, “A Very Dorrington Valentine’s Day”, but I still need the important part, the part with a flower in it. It could be a “Something & Something” like “Ivy & Intrigue” or a “Something of the Something” like “Mischief of the Mistletoe”. What goes nicely with “A Very Dorrington Valentine’s Day”?

Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it. Post your proposed title for the Hen and Miles story here in the Comments section. Next Wednesday, we’ll open it up to a vote.

The top three runners-up get signed copies of the paperback version of Ivy & Intrigue: A Very Selwick Christmas. The winner gets to title the bonus chapter AND a signed ARC of The Garden Intrigue.

Let the titles begin!


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01/09/12: If You Like….

Given Miles’ and Hen’s landslide victory in the Holiday Bonus Chapter Contest, this seemed like a good time to explore Black Tulip read-alikes.

If you like Henrietta and Miles, you’ll probably also like….

– Julia Quinn’s The Viscount Who Loved Me. Hen and Kate would get along like a house on fire. Ditto for Quinn’s The Duke and I. Like Henrietta, Daphne knows what it is to be the little sister.

– Julia Quinn’s To Catch an Heiress. I know, I know, more Quinn (what can I say? Hen and Miles owe a lot to her work), but, as a couple, Caroline and Blake remind me so much of Hen and Miles. And did I mention that it features a ridiculous Napoleonic spy? Hen and Miles would feel right at home.

– Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible. Rupert is somewhere between Miles and Turnip on the hero spectrum, and all around lovable.

– Jessica Benson’s The Accidental Duchess. Okay, so the hero is more a Richard than a Miles, but Gwen, the heroine, is so very, very Hen, everone’s best friend with somewhat managing ways and a delightfully crazy family.

– The Mummy. Okay, I realize, this isn’t a novel or a Regency, but that Brendan Fraser character just IS Miles, in oh so many ways. Especially that confused “What?” when he can’t figure out what he’s done to upset the heroine.

Who are your Miles and Hen read-alikes?

01/07/12: Holiday Contest Winner!

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed reading through the contest entries. There were some rather interesting candidates, like Vaughn’s mother. (She’s still lording it over that family pile up north.) The Uppingtons had a considerable fan base, as did that undauntable octogenarian, the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale.

In the end, though, the winners of the holiday contest, by a landslide, were…

Henrietta and Miles!

They were more than twenty points ahead of their nearest competitors. Tied for second place, with exactly the same number of votes, were Geoff and Letty and Mary and Vaughn. You can imagine how Mary must have felt about that!

The plan? To post their bonus chapter here on the website on Valentine’s Day.

What better way to wile away the last few hours before The Garden Intrigue?

01/06/12: Weekly Reading Round-Up

I’ve had my head down over the Kenya book this week (only one chapter left to go!) so it’s been a rather sparse reading round up.

My first book of 2012 was A Lady Never Lies by Juliana Grey. I adored it. It’s set in the 1890s in an Italian villa (hello, Enchanted April!), and based, oh so cleverly, on the plot of Love’s Labor’s Lost. The only down side is that it’s not officially out until August. I cannot wait until the next two books in the trilogy come out.

In the meantime, I’m also slowly making my way through Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations. It’s an ambitious project, charting a cross-section of states that were important in their time but just didn’t make it, which leads to some issues of execution, but I’m fascinated by the idea of it, by looking at history as it was experienced– after all, why shouldn’t the Visigothic kingdom in France have lasted?– rather than as we perceive it in hindsight.

Finally, I’ve just started the last of my Josephine Tey haul, The Franchise Affair. I’ve told myself I’m not allowed to read any more, though, until I finish that last chapter of the manuscript.

What have you been reading?

01/04/12: Just For Fun

Which Downton Abbey character are you? Check out the Downton Personality Quiz.

I seem to be Robert, Earl of Grantham– if it comes with that house, I’ll take it!

01/03/12: ORCHID in Paperback!

Happy birthday to the paperback edition of The Orchid Affair!

For those of you who have the hardcover, I’ve attached the Q&A from the paperback. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

01/02/12: If You Like….

Last week’s post about biographies got me thinking about one of the favorite subgenres of my teen years: the faux diary or memoir, in which a writer impersonates a historical character, purporting to share their innermost thoughts. It provides an intimate take on well-known historical events.

My hands-down favorite of this sub-genre? Anne-Marie Selinko’s Désirée (even if it does provide a very unflattering portrait of one of my favorite historical characters, Hortense de Beauharnais).

If you like the faux diary/memoir, you’ll probably like….

– Jean Plaidy’s Victoria Victorious. It makes sense to start with the greats. No one chronicles queens like Jean Plaidy. A lot of her work is in the third person, but she does have a few, like Victoria Victorious, that provide the more direct, pseudo-memoir approach, including The Queen’s Confession (Marie Antoinette) and Queen of This Realm (Elizabeth I).

– Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. This is the book that is credited with single-handedly reviving historical fiction as a genre and launching an entire cottage industry of Tudor spin-offs. It is incredibly compelling. (The same cannot be said of the movie, which the historical non-fiction writer Leslie Carroll brilliantly described as “Betty and Veronica go to Tudor-Land”.)

– Now that I’ve gotten the Big Names out of the way, two of my recent favorites in this vein are Michelle Moran’s The Heretic Queen, about Nefertiti’s daughter (a topic about which I knew nothing until reading this book) and Juliet Grey’s Becoming Marie Antoinette (self-explanatory).

– I’m also a big fan of Susan Holloway Scott’s thoughtful portraits of the less sympathetic sorts of historical characters: she brings Barbara, Countess Castlemaine, and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, very much to life, giving us a chance to see the world through their perspectives.

I feel like I’m forgetting some very obvious examples…. Which are your favorite faux memoirs?

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