I read five books back in April. Let’s get to them:

A Dangerous Collaboration, by Deanna Raybourn

The fourth book in the Veronica Speedwell series was the weakest so far in my mind. While the Victorian setting was fascinating — a castle on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall with a poison garden on the estate — it felt like scientist and detective Veronica seemed a little off her game. Asked by her partner Stoker’s older brother, Tiberius, to accompany him to the island to collect some rare butterflies for her museum (and under the pretense of his fiancee), Veronica finds herself tasked with solving the mystery of what happened to the bride of the manor who disappeared three years earlier on her wedding day — and who now seems to be haunting the castle. The problem? Everyone present seems to have had a reason to wish her ill — including Tiberius. Will Veronica be able to solve the mystery before she (and Stoker, who follows his brother and the woman we all know he loves) suffers a similar fate?

Of all the gender-bending Sherlock variations I read, Veronica and Stoker come closest to being a true partnership of equal skill and intellect. That aside, though, the reason I read them is because the woman takes the backseat to no one. Does Sherlock need Watson? Absolutely! Is Watson more capable than Sherlock at solving a mystery? Absolutely not! So it rankled a bit that in this mystery the advantage at solving the mystery seemed to favor Stoker. And I get that that may be necessary for overall character development for Stoker to get to take the lead in order for Veronica to truly see him as her equal (and therefore someone she should be willing to enter into a romantic partnership with), but it was irritating that in order for Stoker to get to take the lead in this, Veronica had to be willing to consider the fact that the castle was truly being haunted by a spirit. The author may have cloaked it as scientific open-mindedness, but it felt decidedly out of character for Veronica and led to a disappointing three-star review. Raybourn has announced that the Veronica contract has been extended to include at least another two books, so I’m hopeful they will right the ship. (The next one should focus on Jack the Ripper, since his murder spree was alluded to in this book.)

Pages: 323. Library copy. (more…)

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is one of my semi-annual favorites: looking forward to the books to be published over the next six months. Specifically, what are our most anticipated titles?

1. The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern: November (I loved The Night Circus (like wrote a fan email the minute I closed the book kind of love) and have been waiting for Morganstern to publish literally anything else since then.
2. Rainbow Rowell’s Pumpkinheads: August (A YA graphic novel set in a pumpkin patch in October. I have been looking forward to this since the day years ago that she announced she and Faith Erin Hicks would be collaborating on it.)
3. The Art of Theft by Sherry Thomas: October (The latest in the Lady Sherlock series, which is one of my all-time favorites.)
4. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell: September (A surprise sequel to Carry On, which I should re-read before this comes out.)
5. The Magnolia Sword: A Ballad of Mulan by Sherry Thomas: September (The author of my favorite mystery series takes on the teenaged Woman Warrior of ancient China.)
6. Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Party: July (I haven’t read any of her other books yet, but I’m on the waitlist for the audiobook.)
7. Mackenzi Lee’s Loki: Where Mischief Lies: September (Teenage troublemaker? Yes, please!)
8. Summerlings by Lisa Howorth: August (Set in Washington, D.C., in 1959)
9. Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer: July (The second in the Obama-Biden crime-fighting bromance series)
10. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O’Neill: September (A prequel to the adorable Tea Dragon Society)

How about you? What new releases are you looking forward to coming out in the latter half of 2019?

While I have carried knitting with me a bunch of places, I’ve done nothing else with it this week. So I’m not going to bother showing you this week’s lack of progress on any of those three (!) projects.

I have, however, been reading.

Here are the four books I’m currently working on in paper:

I mentioned that Rudi found Peter Mayle’s final collection of essays at the book sale on Sunday. I’m loathe to rush through them because, well, he’s dead and no more will be coming. I love his humor and count A Year in Provence as one of my favorite books of all times. (And one I’d been thinking of re-reading in the near future.)

I bought Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway at the start of this spring after Rudi mentioned hearing about a book that featured candlepin bowling in Massachusetts at the outset of the 20th century on NPR while driving home from the ski hill. She was reading locally soon after that and I noted how many people at the event enthused about her style. (I felt bad; I’d never heard of her.) The Tournament of Books is running a summer edition, Camp ToB, with several books I’m actually interested in, so I pulled it out earlier this week, and have proceeded to attempt to read aloud to anyone sitting still in my proximity clever turns of phrases, gems of sentences, and even whole paragraphs. (As an aside, isn’t it interesting how reading aloud, particularly to other adults, is such an intimate act, yet we really don’t value it as such? Here is something that nuzzles my soul, we say; I hope you will find it moving in a similar fashion.)

I started Emergency Contact last week and, to be honest, I’ve found the beginning a little slow to get started, and I would give up on it soon if my friend Jenn didn’t rave about it so. Our two main characters have finally just had their first solo encounter, so I’m hopeful that it’s about to pick up.

Finally, I had a day today and at 7:30 finally headed out into the beautiful evening to read at the cafe for a bit. I needed fun and familiar and pulled the latest Discreet Retrieval Agency novel out of my library bag to keep me company. Lola and Bertha (and dog Cedric) are up in Vermont on a case that’s gone pear-shaped just before Christmas. You may remember that I read the third book in the series, Come Hell or Highball, earlier this spring, and I don’t usually like to binge series. But I requested it from the library and it came in quickly and … well, it was what I needed tonight, so I’m glad it was at hand.

Would you like to see what other people are reading and hear about how they actually work on their knitting, rather than shifting it from one bag to another? Head to As Kat Knits for her weekly roundup.

This needs to be short, because I dozed off writing it and I have to go to bed.

I suppose I would get further faster with my sock if I picked it up on days that didn’t start with “w.” I am through the cuff now and am ready to begin the leg.

New books started this week: Tricia Levenseller’s Daughter of the Siren Queen, the second in a duology about a female pirate & her crew, and Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi, about two friends who meet the day the girl starts college.

Head over to As Kat Knits for other book/craft combos.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to recommend ten books from our favorite genre. I’ve got ten mystery series I like to share with you (I’ve only included series where I’ve read more than one title, which lets out several great series I’d otherwise also recommend) where I can only attest to the debut book):

1. The Lady Sherlock series by Sherry Thomas (1st book: A Study in Scarlet Women)
2. The Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (1st book: The Cuckoo’s Calling)
3. Miss Fisher Mysteries by Kerry Greenwood (1st book: Cocaine Blues)
4. The Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn (1st book: A Curious Beginning)
5. The Discreet Retrieval Agency series by Maia Chance (1st book: Come Hell or Highball)
6. The Book Scavenger series by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman (1st book: Book Scavenger)
7. Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries by Donna Leon (1st book: Death at La Fenice)
8. Being a Jane Austen Mystery series by Stephanie Barrow (1st book: Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor)
9. The Lizzy and Diesel series by Janet Evanovich (1st book: Wicked Appetite)
10. The Evan Evans series by Rhys Bowen (1st book: Evans Above)

How about you? What are books you recommend in your favorite genre?

I’m going to rip out a few dozen rows on my shawl, I’ve decided. It’s been sitting in time-out while I considered my options, wondering if I was being too picky. Eventually I decided to consult Rudi. If he noticed, without much prompting, what the problem was, then back I should go.

And he did.

The problem is right there at the center “v” of the shawl, where it briefly, but rather abruptly, switches to orange. When I was lining up my leftovers, it didn’t seem like such a sharp changeover, but it is in real life. And if I’m going to have spent six years knitting a shawl, I should probably not include the bit I’m unhappy with at its most visible spot, right?

Luckily, I think that if I just rip back and excerpt that little bit of orange that it will fade much more in concert with the rest of the shawl. And hopefully it won’t cause me to run short of yarn. Keep your fingers crossed…

On the reading front, I’m reading Sandhya Menon’s From Twinkle, with Love, a YA romance featuring an Indian-American teen who wants to be a director. The novel is written in journal format, but as letters to famous female directors that Twinkle admires. In audio, I’m listening to one of this spring’s Audiobook Sync titles, Swing, by Kwame Alexander. So far, I’m finding it far more similar to his sports titles, which I loved, than his previous music-related book, Solo. Although to be fair, Swing combines a focus on music with a focus on baseball, so maybe this is the culmination of both. I’m also reading Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers, a memoir about immigration, abuse, and cancer, because I went to school with one of her siblings. I’m early in right now, but appreciate how hard it must have been for her to share her story with the world.

Want to hear more about what people are crafting and reading? Head to As Kat Knits for the roundup.