I finished The Wizard’s Daughter by Barbara Michaels. I gave it an A- grade. The characters and plot were only so-so, but it was an easy, enjoyable read. In this story, an orphaned young woman named Marianne dreams of becoming a singing sensation, but she’s so eager and naive that she gets duped into performing at a risque establishment, which puts her in a dangerous situation. Then she is discovered by a wealthy duchess who thinks that she may have a gift for spiritualism. The duchess takes Marianne in and pampers her, with the expectation that Marianne will contact a spirit for her. Marianne is not convinced that she has the gift, but strange things keep happening around her, and she she may have traded one dangerous situation for another.
I am currently reading The Shadows (The Books of Elsewhere, Vol. 1) by Jacqueline West and not particularly grooving on it, but it’s short, so it shouldn’t take long. Livia saw that I was reading it and said, “Why are you reading that instead of the second book of The Forbidden Library?” Why indeed? I loved the first book of TFL (by Django Wexler), which is why I bought the second one, and Livia adored them both so much that I bought the rest of the series, so why am I not reading it? And the answer to that question is that I have about a billion books but no methodology for deciding upon a reading order. I read whichever book ends up in my hands at the exact moment at which I need a new book to read. I persist in believing that I will read all of them someday, so it doesn’t matter which order I read them in. BTW, none of this is to pick on West’s book. It has good ratings, and my only problem with it so far is that it’s not quite suiting my mood.