• What I'm reading

    We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett

    From the back cover: Seventeen-year-old Revna is a factory worker, manufacturing war machines for the Union of the North. When she’s caught using illegal magic, she fears being branded a traitor and imprisoned. Meanwhile, on the front lines, Linné defied her father, a Union general, and disguised herself as a boy to join the army. They’re both offered a reprieve from punishment if they use their magic in a special women’s military flight unit and undertake terrifying, deadly missions under cover of darkness. Revna and Linné can hardly stand to be in the same cockpit, but if they can’t fly together, and if they can’t find a way to fly…

  • What I'm reading

    Help, I’m in a reading slump

    I’ve been in reading slump for months so you if you have any recommendations for fun science fiction and fantasy to lift my spirits, let me know! I still haven’t figured out how to turn on comments, so email me at raf @ rafmorgan dot com or visit my Facebook page. I have been able to do some re-reading, so I gorged on Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series in anticipation of the newest and last book, The Return of the Thief, being released in March–and then the publication got pushed back to the end of August! WAH! Still, I love these books and love re-reading them to figure…

  • The Thief
    What I'm reading

    Books I love: The Thief

    I am so re-reading all of Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief books in anticipation of the last book. I’m a bit early in the year since Return of the Thief was supposed to be out this month but has been pushed back to August. (August! I have to wait until August?!) Why do I love these books so much? I think because Turner seems to have no fear in writing on so many levels. She does things to her characters that I think other authors would shy away from. She takes her characters in unexpected directions, and I believe in them. The first book was YA, but now the…

  • What I'm reading

    Three retellings of The Goose Girl that I love

    For some reason I love retellings of The Goose Girl, though I’ve never been much of a fan of the original. Of course there’s Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl, which is the first book of hers I read. That was way back in 2012, and I didn’t write a review anywhere at the time, so I have to depend on my memory to tell you why I loved it. What I remember: girl friendships are very important (that’s your surprised face, right?) in counterpoint to female betrayal; Hale’s prose, which is just lovely no matter what she writes; Ani has a lot of agency and it’s agency that makes sense…