Graceling is set in a world in which some people are graced with gifts. They might be as pleasurable as the grace of fine cooking, or as deadly as the one that Katsa has; she is graced with the ability to kill. Because of this grace, she becomes the tool of a corrupt king who […]

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A hasty update on various things before I run out the door to catch the ferry (I’m going to San Francisco, and I believe in public transportation!):

A new Notes & Queeries is up at AfterEllen.com. This month I wrote about a recent South of Nowhere episode in which Spencer comes out to her grandmother; it […]

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I come to every Robin McKinley book with a lot of expectations, because I have read and re-read her books more than any other books, period. I am a genuine, bona fide Robin McKinley fan, and therefore it’s sometimes difficult to read one of her new books because I’m constantly muttering under my breath, […]

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For the past month I have been working on yet another major rewrite of Ash (hopefully the last big one!), and I just finished a feverish week of writing till midnight (midnight!) and drinking Diet Coke and not seeing any real people (OK, I saw them, but I didn’t talk to them!), and today I […]

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True confession time: I am fascinated by agriculture. I believe this began when I first read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy as a kid. Sure, everybody loves Little House on the Prairie etc., but my favorite of her books was her mouth-watering depiction of Almanzo Wilder’s childhood on a farm. The food in that book […]

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This week is the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week, which has been observed since 1982 and "reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted." Among the 10 most frequently challenged books of 2007 is Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, for its "religious viewpoint."
Pullman recently wrote (via Read Roger) with glee […]

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I recently read Dairy Queen and The Off Season by Catherine Murdock, two young-adult novels about DJ Schwenk, a Wisconsin farm girl-turned-football player. Yep, football player.
This isn’t generally the kind of book I’d pick up on my day off, but something about the idea of Wisconsin appealed to me. I visited rural Wisconsin last […]

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