Isla has been in love with Josh since their first year together at the American boarding school in Paris, but he’s been unattainable for most of her time there. Instead she’s been pining for him from a distance, hanging out with her platonic BFF Kurt (who has Aspergers’ Syndrome). Now in their final year together, it looks as if all of Isla’s dreams are coming true. Josh not only notices her, he wants to be her boyfriend! True love’s path doesn’t exactly run smoothly though, […]
Costumes and figure skating and inventions and infatuation
Synopsis from Goodreads because I read this way too long ago: Budding designer Lola Nolan doesn’t believe in fashion … she believes in costume. The more expressive the outfit – more sparkly, more fun, more wild – the better. But even though Lola’s style is outrageous, she’s a devoted daughter and friend with some big plans for the future. And everything is pretty perfect (right down to her hot rocker boyfriend) until the dreaded Bell twins, Calliope and Cricket, return to the neighbourhood. When Cricket […]
A historical romance with a maths genius
Young Rose Sweetly is a computer in Victorian England. This means she works for a male astronomer, doing amazing feats of arithmetic and calculation to help him in his work. She lives with her pregnant sister, taking care of her while waiting for her brother-in-law, a naval doctor, to return from abroad. Preferably before the baby is born. She’s also very much in love with her neighbour, the infamous author and columnist Stephen Shaughnessey. Yet she heeds her sister’s advice. He is a legendary scandal […]
This is Madness!
Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction, …Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden […]