About a Book

Ho hum: this book is about stealing feathers. Wait a minute. It’s really about stealing feathers? Why yes, yes it is, and for that we can be grateful. Kirk Wallace Johnson ’s The Feather Thief does the job that so many enjoyable nonfiction books do, of giving you an author who for one reason or another, becomes the one person who should tell you a true life story. From the moment he hears of the thief Edwin Rist , who in this century stole about $1 million worth of bird feathers collected in the Victorian era, Johnson is in. His book takes us on his journey to understand and explain Rist to his audience, and fills in details of how the heist came to be. Wallace shines when he imagines Rist in action, such as when he breaks into the natural history museum in England to access the feathers. We see the dozens and dozens of birds fall into Rist’s suitcase, that same suitcase then tucked between the young man’s legs on the subway as he travels back to his apartment. At each step,...

If the headstrong and self-determined character Jane Eyre was ahead of her time in the late 18 th /early 19 th century world she inhabited, it’s hard to imagine that Ms. Eyre would have been anything but blown away by the forthrightness and independence of Lyndsay Faye ’s Jane Steele . Jane Steele is not a reimagining of a classic, such as Bridget Jones’s Diary was for Pride and Prejudice , or a genre mashup like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Instead, Faye sets Steele in a similar time period and gives Jane Steele a lot more tools in her toolbox than Jane Eyre had, including combat skills for offing the men who try to do her wrong. We first see Jane Steele stuck under the thumb of her Aunt Patience, who sends her to a boarding school. There Jane commits a second murder of the headmaster who gave her the choice of watching her friend starve or being sent to an insane asylum. Her first murder, if you can call it that since the death occurred while Jane sought to protect...

            There’s wisdom in starting your book off with a bang, in grabbing your reader, from the jump. Brendan Duffy does just that in The Storm King, as his first chapter, set in an Adirondack town named Greystone Lake sees a car fall off a cliff into treacherous water, with a family of four, including the book’s main character Nate, inside.             Young Nate survives, but his parents and brother don’t. After cheating death, Nate spends his youth with his grandma in Greystone Lake , and in his teens channels the rage that formed from his early loss into his high school persona of The Storm King. Nate The Storm King spends his high school years exacting revenge on anyone who does him or his friends wrong.             We learn of the clever, sometimes violent, and often deliciously satisfying acts of the ...