My Review: There’s a major snowstorm crashing down on Shining’s head in this one - and bloody damn (as Shining herself would put it - I didn’t need the up-close-and-personal reminder of what’s headed my way in real life as it headed towards hers in brilliantly realized fiction. I’m still here for the cats, six years and four books after the first utterly terrific book in this series, …

My Review: I’ve read the Quinn & Costa series from the very first book, The Third to Die - albeit out of order. Nevertheless, I’ve found each and every book in the series to be compelling and absolutely un-put-downable in the reading - even if at the end I find myself wondering WTF happened along the way. This book turned out to be one of THOSE kinds of reads.

My Review: This is SUCH a Chicago story. Specifically a story about the "City of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world” - even though Carl Sandburg’s famous poem won’t be published for another SIXTEEN years. It’s a story about a city whose politics are so thoroughly, infamously corrupt that its reputation was already made in 1898 and persists well into the 21st century.

My Review: This series began with The Right Sort of Man about two women opening a marriage bureau in post-World War II London. Miss Iris Sparks, formerly something seriously clandestine during the late war, and Mrs. Gwendoline Bainbridge, formerly a resident of a sanatorium after the death of her husband and the loss of what would have been her second child, start their agency because they both need jobs.

My Review: I want to call Prairie Nightingale (and that really is the protagonist’s name and the story behind it explains SO MUCH about her character) a domestic goddess. But that’s not what she claims to be and that’s not what she really is. She’s calm on the surface and paddling like hell underneath just like everyone else - which we know because we’re inside her head.

We're supposed to be getting an ice storm today. So I'm probably huddled under a comforter with a good book and as many cats as I can get to cooperate. Not that cats are generally all that cooperative. OTOH, it could all blow over, or pass us by, or just not be, well, all that. The last option is what we're hoping for.

This is another one of those stacks where there's more "pretty creepy" than there is just plain "pretty". The "pretty creepy" category includes The Way It Haunted Him and The Sleeping Sisters, while Snow Kissed is kinda creepy in that it might be predicting this weekend's weather for everyone east of the Mississippi. We don't normally get that much snow here in the ATL, but we might this weekend.

My Review: Whenever I think of the Wayward Children series, I imagine of the chase scene from Monsters, Inc. that takes place in the vast, cavernous space where all the doors are stored. I want to see a place just like that in this series - but I KNOW that the doors that these wayward children go through, sometimes back through, and very occasionally stride through one more time - or even more - aren’t stored that way.

My Review: I fell hard for the first book in this series, The Dentist, so I’m ever so grateful to the publisher Atlantic Crime for bringing this series out in the US even if (and especially because at the same time) it’s been out in the author’s native UK for several years and is very popular there. I hope the same turns out to be true on this side of the pond, because, so far at least, the series is awesome - especially for mystery fans who love a detective with a unique perspective AND a thoroughgoing, intricate, well-executed, police procedural.

My Review: Eleanore Blanchet was named in honor of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and she certainly did her best to live up to the legacy of her famous namesake. Not that their lives had nearly the same scope - even though Elea Blanchet found herself closer to the halls of power than she ever expected to be. The story takes place in 1347, in Provence, in the city of Avignon.

My Review: The opening scene of this book is absolutely, even cinematically, iconic. To the point where the reader can almost see it as the opening of a new Mad Max movie - except for one rather large detail. It’s the scene of a young man pedaling a dusty but serviceable bicycle on a cracked and ruined highway in a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape.

A proclamation by President Obama on 13 January 2017: Those who dismiss the magnitude of the progress that has been made dishonor the courage of all who marched and struggled to bring about this change -- and those who suggest that the great task of extending our Nation's promise to every individual is somehow complete neglect the sacrifices that made it possible.

As you read this, I'm on the last day of a four-day marathon Zoom meeting and my brain is probably toast. This is a once a year thing, as whatever ALA committee I'm on for the year has its final deliberations meeting. It's generally a lot of fun, it's always fun to talk about good books, but four solid days of Zoom is just, well, A LOT.

Unlike last week's stack, there are some truly pretty covers this time around. Especially All the Tea in China, Daughters of the Sun and Moon, and Our Perfect Storm. There's also some pretty creepy in Brimstone Hollow and The Museum of Unusual Occurrence. I definitely picked up You Had me at Bigfoot, while the books I'm most looking forward to getting into are…

Welcome to the Winter Wishes Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox and Mom Does Reviews! Winter started yesterday here in the ATL and it looks like it will be over in the middle of next week. I'm joking, but not by all that much. The winters here seem to get warmer and shorter every year. Very much on the other hand, the summers are longer and hotter than Hades.

My Review: They called him “the architect of New York” in his New York Times obituary dated February 2, 1908. And he was. Or rather, THEY were. The title in the obituary, at the time it was written, referred to the elder Guastavino, Rafael Guastavino Moreno, but even then it could have referred to either Rafael Guastavino, the father or the son he named for himself and trained to be his protegee, his right-hand man, and his shadow.

My Review: I originally picked this up because I fell in love with the author’s cozy fantasy novel, Shoestring Theory, about a cat and his wizard. I fully admit that I was there for Shoestring a whole lot more than I was for Cyril, Shoestring's poor, incompetent human. I doubt anyone is surprised by this one little bit. I don’t read a lot of graphic novels, but I loved Shoestring a lot, and this was recommended to me as part of a panel I was asked to moderate for…

My Review: The Elsewhere Express is a train. Well, it takes the form of a train. Whether or not it's actually or exactly a train is up for a bit of a debate. It’s mostly a metaphor. Well, sorta/kinda. And does that EVER need some explanation. Which is not what the two most recent passengers on the Elsewhere Express get. Also not exactly but sorta/kinda.

My Review: Before you begin reading Nine Goblins - and you SHOULD read Nine Goblins - expunge everything you think you know about goblins from your head. Because these goblins are not like that at all. And considering the way that goblins (and orcs and other supposedly born evil creatures) are used in fantasy as substitutes for whatever foreign element of the population is the enemy of the day, they probably never were.

Last week, it seemed like there was all the time in the world. This week, not so much. Not nearly so much. Possibly not even enough.  And how was your first week back to the full-on daily grind? It's not that I'm not actually enjoying the return to routine - just that's there's so much of it! Even Tuna is tired by it all.

Is it just me, or does this whole stack sort of just miss 'pretty'? If I HAD to pick, and I sorta/kinda do, I'd pick A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing and Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous. OTOH, The Black Cat Detectives are adorably cute and Bodies of Work creeps me right the hell out. Those black cats also represent one of the books I'm most curious about this week…

My Review: I picked this up because I enjoyed the previous book in this series, Intergalactic Exterminators, Inc. Which I reviewed for Library Journal but didn’t here at Reading Reality. I’ve decided that I need to review this second book here just so that I can process it fully inside my own head - and maybe get it out of my brain a bit more.

My Review: The “sorcerous plates” in this fourth entry in the delicious Hidden Dishes series do not, for once, come from the kitchen of Mo Meng, the seemingly immortal mage who owns both the restaurant and chef’s hat at his hole-in-the-wall Toronto restaurant. A restaurant that is called “The Nameless Restaurant” because he never bothered, and can’t BE bothered, to name it.

My Review: Owen Archer, Captain of the Guards for the city of York in 1377, takes his responsibilities seriously. But his duties to his family, his city, AND to be the eyes and ears in the North of Princess Joan, the mother of the new and very young King Richard II, often pull him in multiple, conflicting, directions. And that’s certainly true in…