First, the summer issue of Eclectica Magazine is up and there is a ton to read over there. From me, there is a piece on books set in mysterious houses (Flora Segunda, Treasures of Weatherby, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Larklight and Daemon Hall), another on teenage romance (Dream Factory, Anything But Ordinary, Cupcake, Better Than Running at Night and Wide Awake), another on summer picture books (Chicken Joy on Redbean Road, Oddhopper Opera, Young Cornrows Callin' at the Moon, In My Backyard, Ask Dr. K. Fisher About Animals, Cool Bopper's Choppers and Hugo & Miles: I've Painted Everything).

Other than Hugo & Miles, I don't think I've read about any of those picture books anyplace else - which partly frustrates me as they are all great but also makes me happy because at least I've found them! ha! Oddhopper Opera has been out a while, so I might have missed the first round of reviews for it, but it's so wonderful...a great reading aloud book and perfect for animal lovers.

And well, I enjoyed all the other books as well, although I caution you that Daemon Hall is really heavy on the creepy side - and seriously horrific. Dream Factory is utterly fabulous and the best beach/pool/hammock romance ever and I won't even bother going on and on about Flora Segunda - we all love it and I'm just the latest to get on that bandwagon.

I also reviewed James Prosek's The Day My Mother Left and I'm still convinced it should have been marketed to adults. It just doesn't read as a teen voice; it's an adult remembering his childhood and it's still a good read, but not on target to YAs - at least to me anyway.

I'm still reading Emma Bull's Territory and I've decided Wyatt Earp was a serious tough guy - and not always in a good way. Kurt Russell made him a way more sympathetic character than Emma is, but I imagine I was partly blinded by my long love for Russell and missed all the mean guy parts. This book is seriously good stuff people, and I'm looking forward to writing about it.

I'm also reading Your Own, Sylvia by Stephanie Hemphill which is basically a biography of Sylvia Plath in verse form. Very inventive and emotional and intense. I'm so impressed by how well written this book is. It will fit perfectly in my September column which is all about impressing your English teacher, although I did not learn beans about Plath when I was in high school. We were all Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. I honestly can't remember reading a single female author or poet back then...not that there's anything wrong with the guys, but mixing it up a bit would have been nice. (I mean really - I grew up in Central FL and never heard word one about Zora Neale Hurston; how is that possible?!)

I finished Interfictions and I'm rather blinded by love for Holly Phillips right now. "Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom" was so understated and yet so very beautiful. I don't write in a pretty or elegant way - I'm rather stark in fact. This sort of writing always moves me to reconsider my own way of writing - to think about shifting or softening or finding a way to be more understated.

Yea - like I could ever be understated.

What was interesting to me though is that the protagonist is a writer who is struggling to write - the reason she is struggling though is that she is in a foreign country and her diplomat-type boyfriend has been kidnapped. So she's stuck waiting, every day, to hear some news - or no news - on her love. I thought it was kind of an interesting metaphor on writers who are stuck - you want something to happen but also you don't; you're afraid to sit down and make it happen. When something does happen in the story - someone from the embassy shows up at her door - the protagonist panics, of course. As much as she dreads the blank page, she prefers it to what could appear.

Plus the whole idea was just so timely, I really thought it was well done.

I'm rereading Pamela Dean's Tam Lin - again - and learning even more about it to love. I adore this book - the richness of all the plotting and subplotting and the many many characters. It is so perfectly collegiate that it makes me want to go back in time and convince my 17 year old self to go away to some liberal arts school somewhere and wallow in reading and writing. It would have been heavenly - at least in my adult reimagining of it all.

I love The Explosionist as a title and wish Jenny D. could title everything I write; I'm horrible at it. (Seriously though - won't that title alone make you want to pick up the book?)

Gwenda and Gavin both mention Lewis Shiner's new site where you can read his short stories for free!! I have loved Shiner since first reading "Perfidia" in Subterranean Press magazine last year. I recommend that one highly if you are any kind of Glenn Miller fan. I'm so glad to see that he has finished his novel and I will certainly be front and center to buy it. Lewis Shiner is one of those authors that should be getting way more attention then he does and I hope this is the book that brings that to him.

Leila got crafty with The Long Secret over the weekend. I loved this book also - she needs to make cards or something with these, don't you think?

I updated yesterday's Wicked Cool Overlooked Books post - check and see more books you might have missed the first time around!