Top Ten Tuesday is all thanks to Broke and the Bookish!
Winter is my favorite season. I wait for it literally all the rest of the year and there are always certain books that come to mind when I picture curling up in front of the fire.
It happens at the
start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold
of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some
riders live. Others die.
At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the
returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any
fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them.
Puck
Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio Races.
But fate hasn’t given her much of a chance. So she enters the
competition — the first girl ever to do so. She is in no way prepared
for what is going to happen.
"It is the first day of November..." and so Jessie must always reread the first Stiefvater she ever read.
Since the night of the
crash, Wren Wells has been running away. Though she lived through the
accident that killed her boyfriend Patrick, the girl she used to be
didn't survive. Instead of heading off to college with her friends as
planned, Wren retreats to her father's isolated studio in the far-north
woods of Maine. Somewhere she can be alone. Then she meets Cal Owen.
Dealing with his own troubles, Cal's hiding out too. And when the
chemistry between them threatens to pull Wren from her hard-won
isolation, Wren has to choose: risk opening her broken heart to the
world again, or join the ghosts who haunt her.
I've only read this one once but the snow and the season are such an important feature of the story.
A long lost letter
arrives in the post and Edie Burchill finds herself on a journey to
Milderhurst Castle, a great but moldering old house, where the Blythe
spinsters live and where her mother was billeted 50 years before as a 13
year old child during WWII. The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have
spent most of their lives looking after the third and youngest sister,
Juniper, who hasn’t been the same since her fiance jilted her in 1941.
Inside
the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But
there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst, and Edie is
about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in
‘the distant hours’ of the past has been waiting a long time for someone
to find it.
Morton once again enthralls readers with an
atmospheric story featuring unforgettable characters beset by love and
circumstance and haunted by memory, that reminds us of the rich power of
storytelling.
Eerie, evocative, the part and the present narratives, and all with a decaying castle.... who wouldn't want to read this on a autumn or winter's night?
The clock chimes midnight, a curse breaks, and a girl meets a prince…but what follows is not all sweetness and sugarplums.
New
York City, 1899. Clara Stole, the mayor’s ever-proper daughter, leads a
double life. Since her mother’s murder, she has secretly trained in
self-defense with the mysterious Drosselmeyer.
Then, on Christmas Eve, disaster strikes.
Her home is destroyed, her father abducted—by beings distinctly not
human. To find him, Clara journeys to the war-ravaged land of Cane. Her
only companion is the dethroned prince Nicholas, bound by a wicked
curse. If they’re to survive, Clara has no choice but to trust him, but
his haunted eyes burn with secrets—and a need she can’t define.
With the dangerous, seductive faery queen Anise hunting them, Clara soon
realizes she won’t leave Cane unscathed—if she leaves at all.
Inspired by The Nutcracker, Winterspell is a dark, timeless fairy tale about love and war, longing and loneliness, and a girl who must learn to live without fear.
I've read this the last two years running, right before Christmas. It just captures the feeling of the holidays and The Nutcracker for me.
Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women.
Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth,
beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to
each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the
Civil War.
It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her
own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and
abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as
Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her
sisters with “woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting
as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more
money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune,
and far from being the “girl’s book” her publisher requested, it
explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the
conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the
clash of cultures between Europe and America.
Maybe it's because pivotal Jo and Laurie scenes take place in winter or maybe it's because that's the first time I read this was a Christmas when I was a wee one.
Once upon a time...
you were a princess,
or an orphan.
A wicked witch,
fairy godmother,
prom queen,
valedictorian,
team captain,
Big Bad Wolf,
Little Bo Peep.
But you are more than just a hero or
a villain, cursed or charmed. You are
everything in between.
You are everything.
In
fifty poems Christine Heppermann places fairy tales side by side with
the modern teenage girl. Powerful and provocative, deadly funny and
deadly serious, this collection is one to read, to share, to treasure,
and to come back to again and again.
Unflinching collection of feminist verse fairytale retellings. How else would you celebrate the new year?
For the past five years,
Hayley Kincain and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never
staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have
tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in the town
where he grew up so Hayley can attend school. Perhaps, for the first
time, Hayley can have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories,
even have a relationship with Finn, the hot guy who obviously likes her
but is hiding secrets of his own.
Will being back home help Andy’s PTSD, or will his terrible memories drag him to the edge of hell, and drugs push him over? The Impossible Knife of Memory is Laurie Halse Anderson at her finest: compelling, surprising, and impossible to put down.
Now you too can feel your tears freeze to your face! It's capable of being actually funny and quite heartwrenching but the cover and the family theme make me think of holidays and my family.
Chava is a golem, a
creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles
in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master, the husband who commissioned
her, dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift
as the ship arrives in New York in 1899.
Ahmad is a jinni, a
being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian desert. Trapped in an old
copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released
accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop. Though he is no
longer imprisoned, Ahmad is not entirely free – an unbreakable band of
iron binds him to the physical world.
The Golem and the Jinni
is their magical, unforgettable story; unlikely friends whose tenuous
attachment challenges their opposing natures – until the night a
terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. But a
powerful threat will soon bring Chava and Ahmad together again,
challenging their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.
This book is so quietly lovely and detailed and... it should be read in all kinds of seasons, really.
Koschei the Deathless is
to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European
culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which
have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei
has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente,
whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to
modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian
history in the twentieth century.
Deathless, however, is
no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya
Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s
beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are
Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and
games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of
magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love
and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new
incarnation.
Russia and fairytales and it's a perfect fit for a winter book.
this one's cheating a bit but based on its cover and title...
Beware the goblin men and the wares they sell.
All
her life, nineteen-year-old Liesl has heard tales of the beautiful,
mysterious Goblin King. He is the Lord of Mischief, the Ruler
Underground, and the muse around which her music is composed. Yet, as
Liesl helps shoulder the burden of running her family’s inn, her dreams
of composition and childish fancies about the Goblin King must be set
aside in favor of more practical concerns.
But when her sister
Käthe is taken by the goblins, Liesl journeys to their realm to rescue
her sister and return her to the world above. The Goblin King agrees to
let Käthe go—for a price. The life of a maiden must be given to the
land, in accordance with the old laws. A life for a life, he
says. Without sacrifice, nothing good can grow. Without death, there can
be no rebirth. In exchange for her sister’s freedom, Liesl offers her
hand in marriage to the Goblin King. He accepts.
Down in the
Underground, Liesl discovers that the Goblin King still inspires
her—musically, physically, emotionally. Yet even as her talent blossoms,
Liesl’s life is slowly fading away, the price she paid for becoming the
Goblin King’s bride. As the two of them grow closer, they must learn
just what it is they are each willing to sacrifice: her life, her music,
or the end of the world.
I have high hopes for this -- it sounds like a great retelling of such a famous source. And the cover! I will probably be starting my ARC of this soon because I have zero self control.
