Plotwise, The Apprentices is as unputdownable as The Apothecary, and I am eager for the third installment. Overall, though, this wasn't quite as strong as The Apothecary. It felt like a bridge novel in which characters had to be set into place before the real action of Book 3. And while I underst...
Once upon a time I sat down to read a book called Liars and Saints, which I had noticed in a piece in TIME magazine. I had bought the book with the intent of giving it as a gift, but after reading it I thought better: although not completely terrible, Liars and Saints possessed nothing to recom...
Escrow closed quickly, and she took possession right away. She bought two beds—an optimistically big one and a small one—and the mattress company delivered. There were no bookshelves in the house, but her father would help her build some. She drove her few boxes there by herself and was happy to ...
His father had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier, and Steven had quit a construction job to move home and take care of his mother. She had relied on her husband so absolutely, all her adult life, that she had never filled a gas tank on her own, or looked at a tax form. In her grief, aft...
But Benjamin was having none of it. “It’s all rubbish!” he said. “Invisibility spells. Herbs that make you tell the truth if you cut them at noon. If the gardener told you he was king of the fairies, would you believe him?” “No,” I said. “But it’s possible that the herb affects the brain somehow,...