"The Watcher in the Wall" by Owen Laukkanen is a more personal entry in the Stevens & Windermere series

This book -- which comes out in March 2016 -- is the 5th book in the Stevens and Windermere series.  Although the story stands alone with some brief references to the case from the previous book in the series, I wouldn't recommend reading it without reading at least the first book in the series.  And really I think you should read at least the first couple books because you need to get the history of these characters and why they are working together and what the relationships are among the major characters.  You would still have a really interesting book to read but would lose a lot of the background.

"Watcher" starts out on a very different note from the stories earlier books in the series which all begin with a violent crime that has a Minnesota connection and in which the FBI gets involved.  This story starts out more quiet and sad -- with a bullied teen committing suicide.  Stevens gets involved because the teen was his daughter's classmate and Windermere has her own personal connection and it hits her hard.  For the first 100 pages, it looked like this book was going to be a dramatic change from the past books where the duo criss-crosses the United States hunting down the bad guys with some dramatic action scenes.  But never fear --  even though the beginning of the book is heavy on the touchy feely and on computer research, it doesn't stay passive for long.

If you are a fan of the series.for the action, don't be put off by what seems to be a departure from the usual formula.  You will get all the action you expect as the investigation reveals that there is more to this case than depressed and suicidal high school students.  I am not going to give away any spoilers, but will let you know that the action heats up in a big way.

But even when the action heats up, the personal aspect to the book stays with you.  One of the hardest parts of the book, both for one of the characters and also for me as a reader, is the description of how so many students laugh along with the bullies, not because they want to be mean to the target but to fit in themselves or out of a desire to not become a target of the bully themselves.  I have been out of high school for a very long time but one of my classmates recently shared on Facebook how much her bullying in high school negatively affected her life.  And I feel ashamed that I was too wrapped up with my own desire to fit in and be liked to notice what she was going through.

In the acknowledgements at the end, the author talks about his own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts and encourages bullied or suicidal teens to talk to someone.  He even offers up himself.  I hope someone who needs it takes him up on the offer.

For the rest of us, enjoy another exciting Stevens & Windermere thriller!

"The Wolves" by Alex Berenson takes the character John Wells to a darker place and I didn't care for it

This is Book #10 in the author's John Wells series of spy thrillers.  John Wells is a CIA agent (and later a deniable independent contractor for the CIA) who has spent most of his career infiltrating terrorist cells in Afghanistan and similar countries.  Along the way he converted to Islam -- his religious beliefs and practices form a distinct part of his character.  And like most "lone wolf" spy novel protagonists, he has a complicated personal and romantic life.

I haven't read all of the John Wells books but of the several I have read, this one was my least favorite.  The storyline follows directly from the previous book in the series, "Twelve Days," so you probably should read that book first to understand the context of how the characters relate to each other.

This book is almost the complete opposite of Twelve Days in tone and pace.  The pace in Twelve Days was frantic with Wells going from country to country -- Europe, Russian, Middle East, Africa -- in a very short period of time to try to keep the United States from being tricked into entering a war with Iran.  And it was heavy on the violence as well.  This book starts when events have had a little time to calm down and because there is not a deadline, the action moves more slowly from place to place and even within a set location.  The level of violence is significantly lower in this book, as is the degree to which Wells's physical ability to carry out his mission and escape from tight situations stretches the bounds of believability.  For the most part, Wells doesn't pull off physically improbable stunts.

However, instead of being about saving the United States, the story in this book is all about revenge.  I didn't like that part of the book -- it made the character of John Wells even darker than he has been throughout the series.

One interesting part was how much time the reader spends inside the heads of the bad guys.  They aren't just caricatures but fully formed people who justify their own actions.

If you like this series and this character, you most likely will enjoy this book as well.  I didn't care for the particular focus of this book, but it was still a fairly entertaining read.  Even though this book was merely OK for me 3 stars out of 5), I would still read the next book in the series.

I received an ARC free from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

"Real Tigers (Slough House)" by Mick Herron is not the spy book I was expecting but definitely worth reading

This was not at all the book I was expecting from the blurb on the back of the book. I had not read any of the other Slough House books and always associate spy novels with nonstop action and page-turning speed. So I was a bit taken aback when the book started out fairly slow and "wordy" (by which I mean there are a lot of full paragraphs and not just the spare action and dialogue oriented prose you might see in an American thriller). Clearly this was not going to be a page-turner and I was tired and just wanted some mindless escapism so I nearly quit reading but was convinced to keep going and am glad I did.

The Slow Horses (which I only just now realize is a play on words of the building where they "work") are MI5 agents who have been pulled from official duty for various screw-ups and given make-work assignments designed to make them quit. These folks are not James Bond or any of the great fictional British spies. They are not especially heroic or competent and they don't appear to like each other very much. A lot of the wordy part at the beginning of the book gives the reader insight into these characters and what messes they have made of their lives. It can be slow reading, especially if you are expecting a spy thriller. If you get tempted to stop reading -- just keep going. There is a point to what you are reading and things will eventually start moving.

Just about the time you think the action is really going to start, you get more background but keep with it. This is definitely a book written by someone with a degree in English, not the typical American thriller that is often a mental movie script in novel form. It is much more character driven with a fairly involved plot. Sit back and enjoy the writing.  One of the benefits of so much of the book being about the characters and not just solid action is that it is not critical to have read earlier books in the series to be able to understand and enjoy this one.

I don't want to give out any plot details because it would spoil the surprises the author has built into the story. Right around page 114, I realized what kind of spy book this was going to be -- and it was nothing like I expected. For the rest of the book there were plots and counter-plots until you wonder who the good guys and bad guys really are and who is going to come out on top in the end. And I finally got more of the action I was originally expecting, even though the Slow Horses are not your typical spies.  By the time I finished, I was really glad I had kept reading even though it wasn't the book I had expected. This is definitely a thinking person's spy book -- a literary spy thriller. If all you want is page-turning action, this might not be the book for you. But I still recommend it because it will keep you on your toes.

I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

"Milo Speck, Accidental Agent" is a delightful Dahl-esqe fantasy adventure for younger middle grade readers

I am much much older than the target audience for this book, but it grabbed me from the opening paragraph.  I am quoting  from the ARC, so something might have changed in the final published version of the book, but it gives you a good sense of the flavor of this book:

Milo had read about magic before.  He knew that kids in stories sometimes found magic in secret drawers or hidden away in attics, and he had always hoped that if he were to find magic, it would appear in the form of a mysterious silver coin or a doorway to an enchanted world.  But when magic came to Milo Speck, it came in the form of a sock.  

A sock?!?  Something about that passage captured my attention and pulled me into a story about a very small boy sucked into a world of hilariously doltish (but very large and dangerous) ogres who enjoy snacking on boys.  The story had a very familiar feeling of tongue-in-cheek absurd humor combined with heart but it wasn't until reading the author's note at the end that I realized why -- one of the writers she credits for inspiration is Roald Dahl.  It would be a disservice to compare any writer to the great Roald Dahl, but younger readers who like the kind of humor found in books like "The BFG" should really enjoy this book as well.

Milo Speck, is an unlikely hero.  He is small for his age and his "Grandmother" dresses him in ridiculous clothes that she buys on clearance.  As this book opens, he is wearing a googly-eyed duck sweatshirt that "quanks."  Through an unlikely act of magic,* Milo is transported to Ogregon where he has to avoid becoming an ogre snack, rescue some other kids, figure out what his Dad is doing there, and find a way back home.   There is a lot more to the story, but I don't want to spoil the fun by giving away anything more than what is in the publisher's book blurb.

I really enjoyed the combination of silly fun and adventure in this book and would recommend it for readers on the younger end of the 9-12 age range.  It would also be appropriate for children younger than 9 whose reading level is beyond their years.  Older children might like it as well, especially if they aren't yet ready for the more mature Young Adult books.

It's a great book to recommend for boys who will enjoy going on this adventure with Milo as he  uses his wits and heart to survive the ogres.  Girls will enjoy it as well, but I always like to find books that I think will appeal to boys to encourage them to read more.

*For parents who are uneasy with the idea of magic in books, I hope you will not avoid this book on those grounds.  Milo is not a wizard and has no magic abilities.  He's just a regular boy. The "magic" in the book is mostly confined to the ability to travel between the regular world and Ogregon, though there is brief discussion of some other "magical" creatures in other parallel lands.  The characters themselves don't do magic.

I received an Advanced Readers Copy free through Amazon's Vine program in exchange for a review.

Parents should read "The Honest Truth" by Dan Gemeinhart along with their middle-grade children

I received a free ARC of this book from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

This is a middle-grade book that offers something to both the intended audience (ages 8-12) and the adults in their lives. And each group will feel differently about what is happening in the book. For that reason, I think it would be great if parents read this book along with their children and talked about their reactions to what is happening.

My initial reaction to this book was "Ugh, not another sick kid book. It's going to be such a depressing downer." I didn't decide to read it until I read some other reactions and I am glad I didn't let the subject matter turn me away from it. Because it is not so much about a sick kid as it is about love and loyalty and friendship and dealing with unwelcome news. With a big dose of adventure tossed in to keep the kids from getting bored.

The main character is Mark, a tween or young teen boy who starts out the book by running away from home. The reason is not at first apparent to the reader (other than from what is in the book synopsis) but he has a goal and a destination in mind and knows that he probably won't be returning. He takes some money, some supplies and his dog Beau. Back at home are his best friend Jessie and his family. The story unfolds in half chapters -- the full chapter numbers are Mark's first person narrative and the half chapters are about what is going on back home and told in third person, primarily from Jessie's perspective.

I don't want to give away any spoilers yet (see below) but as an adult reader, there were so many times when I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and talk to Mark and Jessie -- to tell him to call his parents and have them come get him and to tell Jessie to tell Mark's parents what she knew. The choices the young characters face and what they decide to do is probably the most important reason for adults to read and talk about this book with their children/students. It would be really interesting to hear what middle-grade readers think of those choices and whether they would make the same choices as the characters.

The strength of this book is that I was emotionally invested in Mark from the very beginning of the book. His personality, his feelings, and most importantly his relationship with his dog and his friend Jessie shine so strongly that you can't help but care what happens to him, to Beau and to Jessie.

For the younger readers for whom this was written, Mark has a lot of adventures -- both good and bad -- on the way to his destination. That action, along with the great character the author has created, keeps this book from turning into the depressing downer I worried it would be. I think it is a must read, both for the target middle grade readers and the adults in their lives.

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SPOILERS BELOW -- PARENTS SHOULD PROBABLY READ TO DECIDE IF THIS IS APPROPRIATE FOR THEIR CHILDREN

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The elephant in the room with this book, is that Mark has had cancer since he was five and has recently learned that the cancer has returned. This is what sparks his decision to run away. And he isn't just running away. He is running away to climb Mt. Rainier with expectation that he will die on the mountain. This doesn't make it exactly a suicide book because Mark assumes that he is dying already and doesn't want to put himself and his parents through his illness and cancer treatment any more. The interesting thing is that there are several instances along his journey when Mark could have either been killed or chosen to die but at each point he chooses survival and continues trying to reach his goal of reaching the top of Mt. Rainier. And finally one dramatic event makes him affirmatively choose life.

I was reminded throughout the book of the real life story of Brittany Maynard, the young woman with terminal brain cancer, and her decision to end her own life on her own schedule. Again, there is so much in this book for both adults and tweens/young teens.

"The Stolen Ones" by Owen Laukkanen is my favorite in the Stevens and Windermere series so far!

"The Stolen Ones" is the 4th book in the Stevens and Windermere series of thrillers written by Owen Laukkanen. I have been reading them since the first one ("The Professionals") and this one is my favorite so far, but I have enjoyed them all. 

Even though the stories of each book stand alone, I recommend reading at least the first book in the series before reading this one so you get some background on how the main characters started working together.  And really, because this book doesn't come out until March, you have plenty of time to read the first three books before reading this one.

I started reading this series because I thought they were Minnesota-based thrillers and this is my home state.  But although they generally start in Minnesota, I wouldn't call them Minnesota mysteries because the characters end up traveling across the country to solve their cases.  In this book, for instance, the action starts in Minnesota, then goes to Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

I continued reading this series because Stevens and Windermere are such an engaging pair of crime fighters.  Kirk Stevens is a middle-aged Minnesota white guy with a wife and two kids.  He works at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  Carla Windermere is his complete opposite:  she is a beautiful young single black woman from Miami who has been assigned to the Minneapolis office of the FBI.  In the first couple books they end up working together by chance on cases that intersect but in later they work together on purpose.

In this book, Stevens is on vacation in northern Minnesota with his family and gets called in to check out what should be an open-and-shut case of a local deputy shot by a young woman.  But he discovers things are not as easy as they first appear and calls in Windermere and the FBI when he realizes the young woman is a victim of sex trafficking.

One of the other reasons I enjoy this series so much is that the author gives the criminals as much personality -- and time in the book -- as the main characters.  The book isn't all about the main characters trying to solve a crime, it is also about the criminals and what they are thinking and doing.  The author creates criminal characters who are fully fleshed out, not just villainous caricatures. 

The reason I like this book the best so far is that there are two more characters in this book whose points of view are followed -- the Romanian sisters Irina and Catalina who are part of a shipment of Eastern European girls brought to the U.S. to be sold into the sex trade.  They are young but feisty and courageous.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a fast-paced exciting and interesting police procedural thriller.

I received a free ARC of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

Christmas cookie books I love

This is the month for baking cookies.  Even if you rarely eat sweets, chances are that you make cookies some time in December.  I own a shocking number of baking books and a lot of them are specifically cookie cookbooks.  But I have a couple "go to" books for Christmas baking.

I have been a big fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum since The Cake Bible came out (that was my very first baking book) and so Rose's Christmas Cookies was my first cookie specific cookbook.  It has only 60 recipes so it is not an all-purpose cookie book.  But there are good reasons to like this book.  First, she gives measurements by weight (ounces and grams) in addition to volume -- measuring by weight will give you better results.  Second, there is a color picture for every recipe and detailed illustrations for some of the more technical creations (like the gingerbread Cathedral of Notre Dame).  And last but not least, it has some great classic Christmas cookie recipes that I love.  I haven't yet baked my way through all the recipes but have made quite a few.  I made the Mexican Wedding Cakes (aka Russian Tea Cakes) for my friend's cookie exchange a couple weeks ago.  And I use her Peanut Butter and Jelly Jewels recipe to make Peanut Butter Blossoms because her recipe is so much better than the usual one.  There is even a recipe for Bone a Fidos -- dog cookies that my Mom's dog loved.  This is a cookie book that belongs on every baker's shelf.

My church has a cookie sale every November to raise money for some ministry projects and it is my excuse to go a little crazy with baking cookies.  Most years I make between 50 and 150 dozen cookies for the sale.  At those numbers you can't get too fancy and I don't want the ingredients to cost more than they charge for a dozen cookies so I need some more basic recipes.  Icebox cookies -- where you make and chill cylinders of dough, then slice and bake -- are an efficient way to make a lot of cookies.  I can make the dough ahead of time then have a marathon baking session in the church's commercial kitchen.  So for my cookie sale baking, I rely on Taste of Home Cookies which has 620 recipes.  These are the kind of recipes your mother or neighbor would make and most have been submitted by readers of the Taste of Home magazine.  Unlike the lengthy and detailed recipes that Ms. Beranbaum writes, these are short and simple and measurements are given only by volume.  It gives me a lot of varieties of cookies to make for the sale and I usually work my way through the "slice & bake" section.  The recipe for Double Delights is a perpetual favorite.  You make a vanilla dough with chocolate chips and nuts and a chocolate dough with white chocolate chips and nuts then slice each cylinder in half lengthwise and put one half of each flavor together.  Yum!

Fans of Jeremy Bishop's Jane Harper series need to make some noise!

I hate when I get hooked on a book series only to find out that the publisher may not think it has sold enough to be worth continuing.  Bad enough when each book in the series stands more or less alone, but really frustrating when the last book leaves you with a bombshell cliffhanger ending!

Right now, this is how I feel about the Jane Harper series written by Jeremy Bishop (pen name for Jeremy Robinson).  He self-published the first book, The Sentinel and in 2013 the Amazon imprint 47North picked up that book plus the second book in the series, The Raven.  The third book is in limbo.

I need more Jane Harper and if you like feisty sarcastic ass-kicking zombie-fighting heroines, you need more Jane too.  Not to mention that these are not your stereotypical slow stupid shuffling zombies.  The zombies in The Sentinel are ancient Viking zombies awakened on an island off Greenland.

And the zombies only get better in The Raven.  Two words:  zombie whales.  Zombie. Whales.

I don't want to spoil the book so I'll just say that you really have to experience yourself the awesomeness of zombie whales.  And then there is the bombshell dropped in the last sentence that makes me want that third book so much.

So just as Peter Pan called on all the children in the world to clap their hands and believe to save Tinkerbell, Jane Harper needs all the zombie book fans to tell 47North they want more Jane.  Tweet them (@AmazonPub) or email them (47north-pr@amazon.com). Make some noise so we can get the third book.

And if you haven't read the Jane Harper series, do yourself a favor and read them now.  Zombie Vikings.  Zombie whales.

I received an ARC of The Raven free from Amazon's Vine program in exchange for a review.

A great holiday gift idea for younger children: "The Cat, The Dog, Little Red, The Exploding Eggs, the Wolf, and Grandma" by Diane and Christyan Fox

Two things make me love a children's book:  an offbeat sense of humor and the opportunity to use funny voices while reading it aloud.  This book succeeds on both counts and will amuse adults as much as -- perhaps even more than -- their children.  I'm not a big fan of the overly sweet and sincere types of children's books and this one just hit my funny bone.  I laughed out loud in the children's section of the library the first time I read it.  And book pusher that I am, I forced it onto a father who was there looking at books with his children.  As part of my evil plan to ensure that every child gets a book for the holiday season, I suggest this would make a delightful gift!

Although this book is ostensibly about Little Red Riding Hood, it is really about the two main characters:  Cat and Dog.  Cat is a bit of a superior know-it-all and Dog is an overly enthusiastic goofball. Cat is reading -- or trying to read -- the story of Little Red Riding Hood to the Dog.  But Dog loves stories about super heroes and super villains and exasperates Cat with his constant interruptions and questions. Nevertheless, Dog's recap of the story after Cat finally gets to the end makes a lot of sense!  The illustrations are simple but perfectly fit the story and the text is hilarious.

I wondered if children would find this book as funny as I did, so I loaned it to a co-worker for a weekend to see how her four-year-old daughter liked it.  They read it every night. Her daughter thought it was hilarious and had to tell her Grandpa about the exploding eggs and now my co-worker thinks she might have to buy it for Christmas.  I think that is an excellent idea!

Because Cat and Dog are such characters, this book gives great opportunities to pull out some funny voices when you read it aloud.  It really begs to be read with distinctly different voices for Cat and Dog -- preferably ones that fit their personalities in the book.  It will enhance the reading experience.  There is a lot of back and forth between the two characters and the Dog is constantly interrupting the Cat so the different voices will help clarify the conversational flow as you read aloud.  (And be really fun.)

I received a free copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for my honest  review.

"Woman With a Gun" by Phillip Margolin kept me up all night!

I am tired today and it is all Phillip Margolin's fault.  I started reading this book last night and expected to be able to put it aside to sleep, but I kept waking up and reading a little more until I finally gave up, stayed awake, and finished it.

This stand-alone novel is a very different style of mystery so if you are a fan of the author's series be prepared for a change.  Rather than one main character who the plot follows through the entire book, there are a couple of them and the plot is not linear.  In fact, it is not just one story but three interrelated stories that take place in 2015, 2005 and 2000, respectively. And the style is a little bit of legal thriller and a little bit of amateur sleuthing mystery.

The book starts in 2015 with Stacey Kim, an aspiring novelist in NYC who gets inspiration from a photograph at a museum and decides to get the facts about it as background research for her book. The 2005 storyline is about the murder investigation in which the photographer is a witness and the subject of the photo is a suspect.  The main character in that section is Jack Booth, an Oregon prosecutor brought to Palisades Heights to help the local DA with a high-profile murder investigation.  Jack has history with the photographer, which leads to the 2000 story when Jack was a young prosecutor.  Eventually the book returns to the present and all the story lines come together.

That all sounds more complicated than it is and the interrelated stories both keep the plot moving and give the reader insight into the characters' personalities and backgrounds.  (Interestingly, Stacey was the least interesting character to me because her story is all in the present and she lacked the depth of the other characters.)

I had an idea who the killer might be, but for most of the book it could have been almost any of the characters except Stacey.  The confession was a little abrupt and it seemed to me that the evidence that prompted it could have been explained away, but those are minor quibbles with a book that not only kept my interest but kept me awake and reading.  If you like smart mysteries, this one is for you.

In a case of art imitates life, the author got the inspiration for the book from a photograph -- and that photo is on the cover of the book.

I received a free ARC of this book from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

"The Bookseller" by Cynthia Swanson would be a good book club selection

This book is not due to be released until March 2015 but I don't want to wait until then to review it -- especially because I think it would be such a good book club discussion book and many book clubs choose a full year of books at the beginning of the year. 

The book is set in Denver in late 1962/early 1963.  The story is told in first person narration by the main character, a single 38-year old woman named Kitty Miller who owns a book story with her best friend Frieda.  Kitty starts having incredibly realistic dreams about an alternate life in which she has married and decided to use her full first name. In that life, people know her as Katharyn Andersson. 

I can't say too much about the story without giving out spoilers. But I appreciated how the author takes the reader deeper into both lives -- at the beginning both her single life as Kitty the bookseller and her married life as Katharyn seemed too good to be true (especially Katharyn's life) but over the course of the book the reader learns that there are difficult aspects to both lives and choices in both lives that Kitty/Katharyn must make.  While I was reading I kept changing my mind as to which life was more appealing to me.  And when Kitty started incorporating aspects of Katharyn's life into her own, I was really wondering what was going on and where the story was going!

I enjoyed this book a lot and will be recommending it to my neighbors even if we don't start up our book club again.  I will say that it is primarily a chick book -- I am not sure whether men will relate to it as much as women will.

This is the author's first novel.

I received an ARC of this book from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

I really hated "Beautiful You" by Chuck Palahniuk

I haven't read any of the author's other books so I really didn't know what to expect from this book.  I thought it might be a humorous social satire -- when I told my co-workers the basic story line, they all laughed -- so I decided to take a chance on it. This could have been a scathingly funny book in the hands of a writer who really understands and likes women and can poke fun at our foibles without getting ugly, but this is not that book and apparently not that writer. I just don't find any humor in a man using sex to control and manipulate the female population and the overall feel of the book to me was misogynistic, not humorous.  Reading it made me want to burn it in my driveway to help exorcise it from my mind.

This book has a LOT of sex so don't read it if you aren't comfortable with that.  But all that sex is very unsexy and instead ranged from clinical to gross (dead mother's finger used as a sexual aid????).  The first three pages of this book were my first clue that this was going to be an unpleasant reading experience.  The main female character is raped in a public courtroom and no one comes to her aid.  The circumstances are explained much later in the book but that passage made me very uncomfortable.

For social satire to be effective, it has to paint an accurate (even if exaggerated) picture of the follies of society it is intending to skewer. The main female character fails in that aspect.  She is supposed to be a young lawyer at a NY firm and the author has her fetching coffee and looking for chairs for a meeting.  Young lawyers do a lot of grunt work but it is all billable legal grunt work. And the notion that nearly all women would buy the Beautiful You products and then abandon their jobs, families and every other aspect of their lives reflect such a poor understanding of what women are like that it makes the book fail for me.

I don't throw around the term misogyny lightly, but this book felt anti-woman from beginning to end.  I really can't recommend that any women read this book.  I suspect that there will be a number of readers who think this book is brilliant and hilarious -- and I suspect that they will be overwhelmingly male.

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine in exchange for a review.  Obviously getting it free didn't make me predisposed to like it. 

I'm going all fangirl over "First Impressions" by Charlie Lovett

I read "First Impressions" by Charlie Lovett yesterday and got absolutely nothing done.  The book  started out a little slow for me trying to get two main characters going but once I got into the groove, it sucked me in like crazy and I couldn't put it down.  And I wasn't even tempted to skip ahead to the end to see what happened!

This is truly a book for book lovers.  What's funny is that at a time when I am trying to reduce the number of books I have lying around my house, this book made me want to hang out in antiquarian book shops and browse.  And smell the smell of old books.  I loved the parts of the book where Sophie and her uncle were talking about books or sitting and reading together or shopping for books.

In addition to being about loving books, this book is about Jane Austen.  There is both a storyline about Jane that takes place in the past and a present-day mystery surrounding P&P.  Hard core Janeites might hate parts of this book because a fictional older gentleman visiting the neighboring earl critiques early drafts of S&S and P&P and gives Jane suggestions on how to improve the stories (such suggestions now being part of the finished products).  It may seem like heresy to suggest that anyone else had a hand in such beloved books, but I'm not a hard core Janeite so it didn't bother me.

I want to tell everyone to read this book.

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.