Kindred Spirits

It's fitting that last week I blogged about Anne of Green Gables, because she was all about finding kindred spirits and I have just finished Rainbow Rowell's short story of the same title.

I've been waiting for this story to become available, because it was originally released only in the UK for World Book Day and none of us non-Brits could get our hands on it. But at last it's available to all her fans the world over.

It was worth the wait.

Anyone who loves Rowell's books will love this little gem, but if you also happen to be a Star Wars fan (as I am) you will appreciate it on that level too, because the two main characters meet in line for the first Star Wars sequel. I loved the characters and dialogue and Rowell's unique voice. And you can't help loving Elena, the heroine, who says that her favorite movie is Empire Strikes Back because of the kissing.

Oh, yes.

I'm assuming that Rowell is working away on another book, so this little chocolate truffle of a story will have to hold us all over until the next one is released. And then we'll gobble that one up, too, knowing we should slow down because we'll be sorry when it ends, but loving it too much to do anything but read until the end.

I keep a list of favorite authors so that I can periodically check if any of them has a new book out. That's what I was doing when I discovered that Kindred Spirits was released worldwide. So now I need to keep moving down the list—and hoping that the authors I love write a lot faster than I do.

My Old Friend Anne

When I was eight or nine my mother gave me a stack of used books for Hanukah, along with a grown-up brown leather wallet. That was after she and my dad divorced and before she got remarried and landed a better-paying job, so times were tight. But back then kids we knew didn't get crazy gifts for Hanukah, plus I was a big reader, so books were always cool with me.

Anne of Green Gables was in that stack, and I lived and breathed it and read the whole series of books over and over. The romance between Gilbert Blythe and Anne was one of the great romances of my early life, second only (chronologically anyway) to Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. 

I still have that first copy of the book, but it's fragile now and the cover fell off years ago, so I recently bought a fresh copy I could break in anew. This past week I was sick as a dog and did nothing but cough and blow my nose and take my temperature (I need up-to-the minute intel when I'm sick), and my fever left me feeling wiped out and dull. I needed the comfort of a beloved book, and so I put down the new Laini Taylor book, Strange the Dreamer (which I will blog about when I finish) and picked up Anne. 

I'm so glad I read it when I was really young, because there's no way to go back in time and have the full effect of a book if you miss the window when you're young. There are so many books I didn't read when I was a kid—many of them because my brothers read them, which made them boy books and therefore to be avoided. I never read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or A Wrinkle in Time as a kid, and by the time I wanted to, there was no way for them to be magical. I could appreciate them, but that's different than living and breathing them. 

But luckily I found Anne at the right time, and I'll always have that. Every night since I started it again, I've gone to bed smiling.

New Adult is for Everyone

So my current book project is a new adult romance set in college, and while I was hesitant to read other new adult novels while writing one for fear that I would discover that another writer was covering similar territory, in the end I couldn't help myself.

Earlier in the year I read Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do. Even if M/M romances aren't generally your thing, my guess is you'll like reading about two hot hockey players who fall for each other. It's really smart and realistic, and did I mention HOT?

Elle Kennedy and Sarina Bowen write both adult and new adult romances on their own, and I recently read The Year We Fell Down and The Year We Hid Away, the first two books in Sarina's The Ivy Years series. Both were excellent, but The Year We Fell Down was especially moving because the heroine is partly disabled from a hockey accident. It's handled so well and the hero—another hockey player—is perfect. If you start reading Sarina Bowen you'll find that there's a lot of hockey going on.

I started reading one of Elle Kennedy's college books and the heroine had the same name as mine does, so I put it down. I'll pick it up again when my book is done.

My husband and I just bought our first house last spring and now we have a mortgage to pay and hedges to trim (seriously, I can't believe we have hedges to trim), so going back in time to my college years as I write is particularly fun. Much to my surprise, I've even discovered things about myself at that time that got translated to my heroine, so it's been pretty cool.

Also cool: writing about first kisses. Like, first first kisses. So fun.