Cicely Loves Books

Welcome Kat Howard, author of ROSES & ROT - a deliciously creepy book (I mean, that cover, yo!) I can't wait to read!  10 fictional characters you would invite to a dinner party Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She’s smart, eloquent, and competent. Plus, one of my cats is named for her. Minerva McGonagall from the Harry Potter series. She’s probably my favorite teacher in literature, plus she’s a total badass. 3-5. Hermione Granger, Morgan le Fey, and Prunella Gentleman (from Harry Potter, the Arthurian stories, and Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown. ) All three magical ladies – what can I say, I really like magic – all smart, and all people I think it would be great fun to have a drink with. 6. Ludmila, the owner of the Cinderella Bakery from Evelyn Skye’s The Crown’s Game . And I’m hoping that she’ll volunteer to bring dessert. 7. Lila Bard from V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series. Because there is no way the dinner party will be boring if she’s there. I...

Top Ten YA Books That Use Genre to Tell True Stories My favorite genres are the ones that use non-real-world elements, such as sci-fi, dystopian, fantasy, and historical fiction. When done right, it’s exactly those larger-than-life elements that tell the truest parts of the story. I wanted to examine how good people get to the point where they can commit atrocities in the name of their goals. Using a gender-swapped, notorious historical figure made an odd sort of sense. I could explore everything I wanted to, but on a grand, lavish scale. And even though And I Darken is set in the 1400s, the parallels to today’s political and cultural climate are inescapable. I hope it feels visceral and familiar, in spite of the centuries between us. In that vein, I selected ten books I feel use their genre to tell the truest, most timely stories they can. 1–2. Alexandra Duncan’s SALVAGE and SOUND Both of these books are sci-fi, set in the future where space travel and even colonization are a reality...

Hey all! I am so excited to welcome the dynamic duo behind A TOTALLY AWKWARD LOVE STORY, Tom & Lucy, to the blog so they can share their favorite books! TOM: 1. Just William - Richmal Crompton . This was the first book that made me realize how much fun reading can be. It's a series about a mischievous English schoolboy, William Brown, in the 1930s and 1940s, who loves nothing more than coming up with crazy plans and having fun with his friends. I read these books when I was probably 10 or 11, and saw William as a proper hero - he was always very anti-establishment; always in trouble with teachers and his parents, and I remember wanting to be just like him! 2. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4 - Sue Townsend . This is basically the Bible of awkward teenage comedy. It's a "diary" written by a pretentious, unlucky-in-love, socially awkward British teenager called Adrian Mole. Serious laugh-out-loud comic writing. Reading this for the first time made me ...

I'm so happy to welcome Chris Howard, author of NIGHT SPEED, to the blog!  Okay, Coffee Lovers, this is NOT the French Press extraction method that Alana teaches Ethan in NIGHT SPEED. Alana didn’t have time to break it all down in as much detail as she’d have liked, so here we go… Guaranteed to brew an awesome cup of coffee every time, assuming you start with some good beans :) 1. Make sure your French Press is clean! Take apart the filter and stuff every day and soak it with a little soap, sponge it off, then rinse well... You don’t want it to smell like coffee unless you are MAKING coffee! 2. For this method, go with a pretty darn COARSE grind. And use a good quality burr grinder, if you can. It’s best to grind the beans right before you prepare your coffee in the French Press. 3. Try starting with a ratio of 13:1 for the water:coffee. Yes, you will need a kitchen scale :) 4. Find out the perfect temperature for your “hot water” by researching what people recommend for the elevat...

World building of THE IMPOSTOR QUEEN   One of the pleasures of writing fantasy is that you can be as far out as you like, invent entirely new worlds, fresh rules, odd societies, unfamiliar customs, and so on. The Impostor Queen includes all that stuff, but I chose to connect it to a very real place. The northernmost point in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the Keweenaw Peninsula. If you know the place, you will find the map of Kupari in The Impostor Queen to be quite familiar. Part of the peninsula is actually referred to by some as Copper Island—or “Kuparisaari”—in Finnish. Copper mining was the primary industry in that area for a time, and immigrants from Finland were a large part of the population. When I create a world, I feel no real obligation to stick to facts and history (that’s why it’s called “fantasy”), but I like using them as prompts or jumping-off points, and Keweenaw was exactly that for me. I used Finnish language and mythology as inspiration, as well as the general ...