As you read this, I should be somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way back to Egypt. I don’t think I’ll truly be able to relax until I have all six of my stuffed suitcases checked and I’m settled in my seat on our non-stop flight from NY to Cairo.
One thing I always enjoy about summer is getting new books. There aren’t very many bookstores in Egypt, and the ones they have are not particularly satisfying, at least for the authors and genres I enjoy the most. Since I wouldn’t necessarily be willing to pay for international shipping even if Egypt had reliable mail service, normally I just send everything to my father’s house for summer pickup. It’s a little bit like Christmas as I open all the boxes and see all the pretty new books, some of which I had forgotten ordering.
I ordered The Spymaster’s Lady
by Joanna Bourne on the basis of a great review on Smart Bitches. It was every bit as good as the Smart Bitches’ review suggested it would be. There were very few times when the heroine did what I expected her to do and she surprised me in the most delightful ways. There aren’t so many books that can do that. I had also ordered My Lord and Spymaster (The Spymaster Series)
at the same time, which I read immediately after finishing The Spymaster’s Lady. It was also very well written, however it suffered a bit by comparison because the characters and the story were very similarly done and I kept getting them mixed up in my head. They were meant to be in a similar vein because there were a couple of overlapping characters, but I’m sure that the author didn’t intend for them to be totally indistinguishable. I’m going to keep it anyway because I have the feeling I’ll enjoy it at another time, read fresh and on its own terms.
A friend of mine sent me a box of goodies in which she included the book Flirting with Forty
by Jane Porter. She had enjoyed it and thought I would as well. I don’t want to give too much away, but, in a nutshell, it’s about a fairly newly divorced woman who is trying to figure out what her role is in life now that’s she’s a single mom, staring her fortieth birthday in the face. A friend suggests they take a girl’s weekend to Hawaii for her birthday – and then her friend backs out. Let’s just say she has a better time than she expected to. The ending was a tad unrealistic, but what’s so great about constant reality anyway?
Having enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl (Movie Tie-In)
so much, I bought The Queen’s Fool: A Novel (Boleyn)
by Philippa Gregory for the plane right home. It’s a nice, fat historical and at 500 pages it ought to be long enough to entertain me for the entire flight, in case my e-reader and my netbook both lose their charges. Heaven forbid I should have any big delays – I think I’ve already had my share of those!
With luck, I’ll be back live by Wednesday as usual, jet lag permitting, though it may take me longer to get back to you with my thoughts on The Queen’s Fool.
