Austenland

I want a Pembrook Park with Colin Firth...

Austenland by Shannon Hale
Booklist Reviews 2007 March #2
Suppose you're a huge fan of Jane Austen, and in particular Pride and Prejudice and in particular Colin Firth's portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the BBC adaptation, and nothing in real life quite measures up. And suppose your great-aunt's legacy to you is a three-week vacation at an Austen-themed resort. This is the situation in which Jane Hayes, New York graphic artist, finds herself. Pembrook Park is a kind of Austen Fantasy Island where the female guests are required to dress, speak, eat, and in every way conduct themselves like heroines in Austen's novels, with actors filling out the roles of eligible suitors. Jane, called Miss Erstwhile for the duration of her stay, tries to get used to corsets and other Regency amusements while sorting out whether the attentions of a Darcyesque Mr. Nobley, not to mention a good-looking gardener, are sincere or part of the show. A clever confection for fans of contemporary Austen knockoffs.

Feral Librarians

Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages

Booklist Reviews 2007 April #1
Klages' stories contain marvels--small, strange things lurking on the edges of normal life. In the Nebula Award-winning "Basement Magic," a cleaning lady and a little girl build a friendship around housework and magic. "In the House of the Seven Librarians," which closes the book, is a charmer about the unconventional upbringing of a child raised by feral librarians. Not all the stories are particularly concerned with childhood. In "Time Gypsies," a woman travels to the past to recover a paper on time travel that was never delivered and instead discovers the failures of history. Of course, the woman who was to deliver the paper is someone the traveler has admired and researched for years, and what transpires is a case of how meeting someone known only through secondhand sources can change all sorts of assumptions. Klages creates wonder-filled and beautiful worlds in her short stories, making this a tremendously satisfying collection.

Feral librarians?!

Logorrhea: excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness

Recent Best Premise for a Book:

Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories ed. by John Klima (a librarian with a blog)
http://bookstoburn.blogspot.com/

"This book is a logophile's dream—a left-field collection of stories inspired by winning words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Anyone who has ever spent an hour or two happily browsing the pages of a dictionary will find something to love here."—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead

Book Description: For most of us, these prizewinning spelling bee words would be difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. We asked twenty-one of today’s most talented and inventive writers to go even further and pen an original tale inspired by one of dozens of obscure and fascinating championship words. The result is Logorrhea–a veritable dictionary of the weird, the fantastic, the haunting, and the indefinable that will have you spellbound from the very first page. There’s only one word for such an irresistible anthology: Logorrhea

The Last Summer of You and Me

Ann Brashares (traveling pants author) was supposed to release her first adult fiction novel last year, but it was pushed back to this summer. Due out in June!

Gracie Martin, a New Yorker with a talent for finding missing objects, considers changing her vocation before discovering a lost backpack and embarking on a quest for its owner.

The Society of S

You can always count on me to let you know about a new vampire book that looks good, and with reviews referencing Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Thirteenth Tale, and The Historian, I am hopeful about this one's goodness...

The Society of S by Susan Hubbard

Thirteen-year-old half-vampire Ariella Montero struggles with the realities of her condition while harboring a desire to unravel the secrets of vampire nature, a longing that leads her to learn about the gentle, wise, and even vegetarian lifestyles of vampires.