Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – Summer 2016
Selected by Jenny and Memory It’s summer, and the cups of your trusty YA correspondents runneth over. We know we led you to believe that we would curate a list…
Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – Spring 2016
Selected by Jenny and Memory In each issue of Shiny New Books, Jenny and Memory highlight the most exciting young adult novels of the season. This spring, they’re perhaps a leetle bit…
Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – early 2016
By Memory and Jenny From music to murder, from a hospital ward to Haworth Parsonage, Jenny and Memory highlight the most exciting young adult novels of the season in the…
Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – Autumn 2015
By Memory Scarlett and Jenny Young adult fiction seems unstoppable these days, with its ever-increasing bookshop floor space and arbitrary, balkanized genre divisions. It’s clear that good YA fiction is…
Q&A with Kathleen Benner Duble about Madame Tussaud’s Apprentice
Questions by Jenny Your fascination with Madame Tussaud is obvious. What led to your decision not to set the book from her perspective, but rather from the perspective of an invented street…
Madame Tussaud’s Apprentice by Kathleen Benner Duble (YA)
Reviewed by Jenny As Kathleen Benner Duble remarks in her author’s note (always my favorite part of any historical novel), Marie (‘Manon’) Tussaud had a fascinating life. Her mother was…
In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars by Jenny Uglow
Reviewed by Jenny Jenny Uglow has delved into the diaries and letters of an abundance of ordinary people — farmers, soldiers, artisans, and their families — to discover the ways…
Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
Reviewed by Jenny. Mary Renault has a genius for the past. It’s in all her historical books: the stony, fated world of the Greeks, rushed forward to our softer and…