Waiting on Wednesday – The Witches of New York by Ami McKay

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Farah Ng @ Broken Penguins

20053031 I was recently at the public library when I saw a sign saying that Ami McKay, author of The Birth House and The Virgin Cure (Broken Penguin review!), was going to be at MY PUBLIC LIBRARY! She’s part of an author Q&A series they hold at Toronto Public Libraries (called The eh List).

Wait, there’s more! She will be promoting her new book, The Witches of New York!

Wait, there’s more! For the low, low price of nothing, you can place a hold on the library book. There are only 182 other holds and the book hasn’t even published yet!

I can’t wait for another 182 people to read this first so I might just pre-order for my Kindle. But then, how do I get that signed?!

I’m so excited or this one because I loved, loved, loved both The Birth House and The Virgin Cure. I got to the last page of both and didn’t want them to end. Here’s a snippet from Witches:

The Witches of New York, a tale of three remarkable young women navigating the glitz and grotesqueries of Gilded-Age New York by any means possible, including witchcraft.

It comes out on Oct. 25, just before Halloween! I think this what witches do when the plot takes a turn that they don’t like:

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Waiting on Wednesday: Belle Cora

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Farah Ng @ Broken Penguins

This is my ninth edition of Waiting on Wednesday, a weekly event held by Breaking the Spine .

Broken Penguins is coming up to its second blogiversary in August and after so many reviews, I have finally narrowed down what I love to read. This may sound crazy to you that I’ve gone this long without knowing but I’ve never really, really narrowed it down. I choose most books based on fantastic reviews, beautiful covers and well-written summaries.

But turns out, I almost always enjoy historical American fiction. Early America was a freak show of sorts and it’s nice to see how North American culture began to take shape. I love the moral complexities of a time period where greed and desperation weren’t strange bedfellows. Add in a society of heavy moral policing and voila, I’ll read it cover to cover.

This also reflects some of the amazing historical American fiction I’ve read recently: Sutton (to be reviewed!), Parlor Games, The Virgin Cure, The Sisters Brothers and let’s not forget The American Heiress.

I want to add one more to the list. Belle Cora by Philip Margulies sounds fantastic. It’s set to be released in January 2014:

Based loosely on the life of the 19th-century prostitute of the same name, the book is written in the form of a two-volume memoir by one of San Francisco’s richest and most revered dowagers. In it, the heroine tells the story of her moral fall and material rise over the course of the century, carrying her from the farms, mills, drawing rooms (and bedrooms) of New York to the California gold rush.

Photo credits: thatkindofwoman.tumblr.com

Waiting on Wednesday: Snow White Must Die

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Farah Ng @ Broken Penguins

This is my eighth edition of Waiting on Wednesday, a weekly event held by Breaking the Spine .

I began university thinking that I’d be an English major but half way through my final modern literature exam, I realized I was sick of it. I didn’t want to analyze T.S. Eliot to death, I just wanted to read it, love it and fall asleep dreaming of fictitious worlds.

SNOW_whitemustdie So I chose to major in Criminology instead. I read about morbid Victorian court cases about cannibalism on the high seas and the horrible conditions of state asylums. And I came to appreciate murder mystery fiction in a whole new light.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus sounds like a fantastic creepy thriller. Neuhaus is widely known German author but this is her first book translated to English. From what I understand, this is the first book in a series which has already done incredibly well in Germany.

Snow White Must Die is available January 15th, 2013.

Synopsis:

On a rainy November day police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: A woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. In a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his home town. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return?

In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is—and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

Painting by Liese Chavez. Print available from Etsy.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Goddess Chronicle

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Farah Ng @ Broken Penguins

This is my seventh edition of Waiting on Wednesday, a weekly event held by Breaking the Spine .

One of my favourite authors is Natsuo Kirino, a woman known as the Queen of Crime Fiction in Japan. Kirino’s stories don’t just give you crime, they give you hurt, pain and pleasure all at once. Her stories sort of just linger in your mind for days because of the beauty and brutality.

I’ve read two of Kirino’s novel: Out and Grotesque. And it’s safe to say, she is not for the faint of heart. Seriously, she can make Quentin Tarantino seem tame sometimes only that characters are actually believable.

Her latest, The Goddess Chronicle, is her rendition of Japanese mythology. Available January 3, 2013.

Publisher’s Synopsis:

In a place like no other, on an island in the shape of a tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of the oracle. Kamikuu, with creamy skin and almond eyes, is admired far and wide; Namima, small but headstrong, learns to live in her sister’s shadow.

On her sixth birthday, Kamikuu is presented with a feast of sea-serpent egg soup, sashimi and salted fish, and a string of pure pearls. Kamikuu has been chosen as the next Oracle, while Namima is shocked to discover she must serve the goddess of darkness. So begins an adventure that will take Namima from her first experience of love to the darkness of the underworld. But what happens when she returns to the island for revenge? Natsuo Kirino, the queen of Japanese crime fiction, turns her hand to an exquisitely dark tale based on the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi.

A fantastical, fabulous tour-de-force, it is a tale as old as the earth about ferocious love and bitter revenge.