Julianne, Author at Better Than Dreams

Tour my bookshelves!

This is a bit of a short one as I’ve been really busy lately, and my last Monday Amusements post here was massive! I thought I’d post my bookshelf tour video above, just in case some of you have missed it, and while we’re on the subject of self-promotion, I was interviewed by Michelle of Fluttering Butterflies for her Celebrating British Bloggers series! Please do go read and leave a comment, I’d love to know what you think of my answers! Now, onto other people’s posts!

On Friday, Publishing Perspectives posted a very silly piece bemoaning an imaginary lack of ‘regular kid lit’ (via half a dozen tweeters, I think the first I saw was @elockhart’s). I mean. SERIOUSLY. It’s called contemporary YA, and anyone who goes into a library or a bookstore or even just spends half an hour looking at book blogs is sure to stumble across it. Jim at YA Contemporary has even made a quite long list of recommendations.

I love seeing desk setups, so ‘Our Writing Spaces’ at Author Allsorts was right up my street. I am jealous of those with desks by windows. My desk is in the corner of my room, surrounded by wall.

I really enjoyed this interview with Marilyn Kaye at Chicklish, about her new book Gloss. I’m all for more historical fiction set in the latter half of the 20th Century!

If only I could have read ‘Things I learnt at university’ at So Many Books, So Little Time, before I finished my degrees! I completely agree with the point about making the most of all that time! I also liked Sophie’s list of underrated reads. I would also nominate Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tale series!Onto my favourite reviews, as I have quite a few!

Readaraptor‘s review of Stray by Monica Hesse, went straight into my wishlist folder. It’s a really unique sounding book, and I haven’t seen any other reviews.

I also loved Magan at Rather Be Reading‘s enthusiasm for When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney and Jo at weartheoldcoat’s love for The Vast Fields of Ordinary, by Nick Burd. Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson has been on my wishlist for years and Jo of Once Upon a Bookcase’s review has encouraged me to hurry up and read it!

Are there any posts you’ve really enjoyed that I’ve missed? Or have you written something recently that you’re really proud of and would like to share? Please do comment and check out the archives!

If there is a more intriguing title out there than St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, well, I’d love to hear it, but I’d also be surprised by it’s very existence! When I saw the spine of this book in the shop I couldn’t resist picking it up. It’s a collection of short stories, and one of the review quotes on the back cover mentions Angela Carter, who is one of my favourite writers. I took it straight up to the till. It took me a few months to finish, as with all short story books. I started reading it when I was reading a novel that was too large to cart around on the tube and it made a great travel read, as it’s quite slim and easy to slip into.

The stories are not connected but what they do have in common is their magical realist atmosphere and quirky settings. Most of the stories draw on mythological or supernatural ideas and almost all the narrators or protagonists are teenagers, predominantly boys, but there are a few girls, most notably in the title story.

As I’ve written before in other reviews, I have issues with short stories and novels which feel like snapshots of a character’s life rather than complete stories in their own right. I can’t say that I didn’t have issues with the abrupt endings of some of the stories in St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, but Karen Russell’s imagination is so fantastic and her ideas are so interesting that I didn’t mind that much.

My favourite story was the title story, ‘St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves’, which is about a pack of girls, the human children of werewolves, who have been sent by their parents into the care of a group of nuns, who give them new names and try to teach them to behave as humans are supposed to. I also loved ‘Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers’, about children with both magical and non-magical sleep issues, and ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’, which is narrated by a boy whose father is a Minotaur.

I won’t say anymore because at least half the fun of reading these stories comes from discovering the details! I would like to read more of Karen Russell’s work, but her novel, Swamplandia! is based on one of the stories that I wasn’t quite as keen on, so I might skip that and go straight to Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her second short story collection.

Julianne

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