The Books I'm Reading Now
I'm reading an upcoming book by a favorite author, Katherine Arden, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, a historical fiction story with magical elements; I'm reading the wonderful Ann Liang's soon-to-be-published young adult rom-com, I Hope This Doesn't Find You; and I'm listening to a historical fiction mystery based on a real-life 18th-century Maine midwife, Martha Ballard, The Frozen River.
What are you reading these days, bookworms?
01 The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn't one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.
I loooooved the mix of vivid historical setting and magical elements in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (see links to my rave reviews below). So I'm excited to read her upcoming book The Warm Hands of Ghosts, scheduled for publication February 13.
In The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Arden sets a story of Laura, a combat nurse, who is searching for her brother Freddie, against the backdrop of the Great War.
Freddie is reported as having died, but strange and unnerving clues indicate to Laura that something more mysterious may have happened to him.
Arden is also the author of the Winternight trilogy, which I loved: The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, and The Winter of the Witch. I mentioned these books in the Greedy Reading Lists Six Wonderfully Witchy Stories and Six More Wonderfully Witchy Stories to Charm You.
I received a prepublication edition of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group--Ballantine, Del Rey.
02 I Hope This Doesn't Find You by Ann Liang
I fell in love with Ann Liang's fake-dating young adult novel This Time It's Real, read it in one rainy afternoon, and included it in my Greedy Reading Lists Six of My Favorite Light Fiction Reads from the Past Year, Six Rom-Coms Perfect for Summer Reading, and My Bossy Favorite Reads of Summer the year I read it.
In Liang's upcoming I Hope This Doesn't Find You, Sadie Wren is perfect...on paper. She's valedictorian, school captain, and model student.
Sadie's one vice is writing scathing, no-holds-barred email drafts. She never sends them, but crafting the furious hypothetical replies to anyoe frustrating her in the world is helpfully cathartic.
That is, until the emails that were never meant for others' eyes are mistakenly sent out.
Now everyone--from her co-captain to her teachers to her classmates--knows how shockingly blunt the "real" Sadie is. And the only one who seems to embrace her accidental show of full honesty is her nemesis, Julius.
I received a prepublication edition of this book, scheduled for publication February 6, courtesy of NetGalley and Scholastic Press.
03 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
Historical fiction? Check. Maine setting? Check. Female character in the medical profession? Check. Cold setting for a cold winter read? Check! The Frozen River ticks so many Bossy boxes, I knew this one had to zip to the top of my to-read list.
Lawhon's novel is based upon the real-life figure of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who defied convention--and, in Lawhon's story, the law.
It's 1789, and in a rural Maine community, a local man turns up dead--frozen into the river. Many aren't sad to find that he is no longer a belligerent threat in town. But he had been charged with involvement in the rape of one of Martha's best friends, and now the sole living man accused of the rape is one of the town's most respected figures--as well as its judge.
I'm listening to The Frozen River as an audiobook, narrated by Jane Oppenheimer, courtesy of Libro.fm and Penguin Random House.
If you like the sounds of this book, you might also want to check out the titles on the Greedy Reading List Six Books with Cold, Wintry Settings to Read by the Fire.