Reading something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue
Some weeks back, I got a lovely surprise in the mail: a folded and gathered (f&g) advanced copy the book “Boo-la-la Witch Spa” (set for release on August 18) all the way from Studio Roxas in New York City.
“Boo-la-la Witch Spa” is written by Samantha Berger and illustrated by Filipino illustrator Isabel Roxas (we know her as Pepper!), who very kindly sent me this f&g. In “Boo-la-la Witch Spa, a harried young witch decides to get “the works” at a popular spa for witches.
Here are another couple of books I had reserved for Halloween: The Last Apprentice: Curse of the Bane, and The Last Apprentice: Night of the Soul Stealer, books 2 and 3 of The Wardstone Chronicles by Joseph Delaney.
I discovered this series by chance — I randomly got it off Bookmooch a couple of years ago (mainly because and read it for Halloween last year. I liked the first book so much, and as luck would have it, the series is available here (P289 each at National Book Store!) so I immediately put the next two books on my Christmas wishlist last year, and got them via the Flips Flipping Pages Kris Kringle. And here came Halloween again, so I broke out books 2 and 3!
I’ve had a copy of Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice for a couple of years now, and only remembered it last week, when I was digging through my shelves of TBR books for some books to read for Halloween. I remember I looked through a list of books that other Harry Potter fans were reading post-Harry Potter, and this book, the first in a series called The Wardstone Chronicles, came highly recommended.
I hadn’t planned on a Halloween theme for the 24-hour Readathon, but I got home late that day from seeing the Galeón de Andalucía at the South Harbor and had no time to pre-select books for the Readathon. Since the pile of scary books was already sitting on my desk, I just grabbed a bunch of them so I could sign up in the nick of time.
I’ve been meaning to catch up on some reviewing backlog, because the to-be-reviewed pile doesn’t seem to be going down. I was saving some books for thematic reviews but the stacks have been driving me crazy, and I’m way off my target for this year, hence I’ve decided to write some flash reviews for the quick reads.
Here’s how it works: I give a summary of the book, my take on it, plus a rating.
Deep breath. Here goes:
