shades of milk and honey Archives

Loved This, Try That: Ruby Red

So, let us guess: you devoured Kerstin Gier’s bestselling time-travel YA novel, Ruby Red, and now you need something to tide you over until the sequel, Sapphire Blue, comes out on October 30? Not to worry! Here’s a summer’s worth of delightful, dark, and fantastical books like Ruby Red with plenty of magic, strong female protagonists, and the occasional talking animal. Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor — Karou is a 17-year-old art student in Prague. An outsider even among the art-school crowd, her few friends have learned to accept her eccentricities: her fluency in random languages, her evasiveness, her [...]

Shades of Milk and Honey

Author: Mary Robinette Kowal Oh, let’s just call it Pride and Prejudice and Magic and be done with it. That’s what you wanted, right? A limply Austenish fantasy novel, set in a Regency-era England where ladies are expected to master magic, aka “glamour,” as one of their genteel accomplishments? A plot and characters as sheer and insubstantial as the folds of magical material used to spin their sensory illusions? No? Well, too late, it’s here. In an era obsessed with matrimony, Miss Jane Ellsworth and her younger sister Melody have a particular reason for desiring the security of marriage: their [...]