Holiday Reading

3 posts in a row, could I be back in the saddle? Perhaps... except this is a post I have been meaning to write since the hot, sultry summer. It happened that Rhiannon had run out of things to read and was requesting my help to navigate our overloaded bookshelves and recommend some books. I came across a book that had been given to Dean long before by someone who had weird ideas about his reading proclivity. It had won a children's literature award and was considered juvenile fiction. Rhiannon started reading the book and enjoyed it.

There are two times of the year when good novels are a 'must' for me - summer on the beach or sitting in the backyard when it is too hot to work in the garden or do any of the many other chores I have and Christmas - especially between Christmas and New Years on the blissful cocooned days after the storm of getting ready for Christmas. So I am making these recommendations now. I picked up Rhiannon's book and started reading it myself, just to check it out and because I, too, had run out of something to read. And I got hooked. I loved the story and went on to read the rest of the series, even when it meant buying the last book in the series in hardcover.

So here is my holiday reading recommendation sure it was meant for the beach but it will work for winter holidays, too. Megan Whalen Turner's Thief Series that stars with this book, "The Thief". We loved the whole series. There is also "The Queen of Attolia", "The King of Attolia" and "Conspiracy of Kings". They are very will written by a master storyteller. "The Thief especially has an awesome ending. Rhiannon and I marvelled about it for days. One of the things I really liked about it is that because these books are considered juvenile fiction, although there is a wonderful romance as part of the story, there is no explicit sex because I would prefer not to read about that. It was just very well written and very compelling.

They are set in the past, based loosely on a fictional, Byzantium Greece. I just might read this series again, I loved being in the story so much.... and I never do that.