Her entry begins:When I was a kid, I was always the kind of person who had three or four books going at once (one to read over dinner, one to hide under my covers, one to hide under my desk at school, one for the bathtub, etc - you can see what my childhood was like). I seem to be heading back in that direction, although I've now learned better than to try to pair reading and showering. (At least until someone gifts me with a waterproof Kindle.) These days my apartment is littered with half-read books, and I pick one or the other up depending on what I'm doing. This week, I'm just back from a trip, which means David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, one of my all time favorites, for the plane. Usually when I'm flying, I try to find something so fast-paced and riveting I won't notice the time passing -- a couple weeks ago, that was Peter Straub's terrifying Ghost Story, a Stephen-King-esque novel about small town evil. But for this trip, I didn't have time to go to the bookstore. Fortunately, Consider the Lobster, a book of ridiculously brilliant essays about things like tennis, politics, lobsters, and porn, turns out to be the perfect go-to flying book, not because you fly through the pages, but because...[read on]About The Book of Blood and Shadow, from the publisher:
It was like a nightmare, but there was no waking up. When the night began, Nora had two best friends and an embarrassingly storybook one true love. When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands and an echoing scream that stopped only when the tranquilizers pierced her veins and left her in the merciful dark.Learn more about the book and author at Robin Wasserman's website and blog.
But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead. His girlfriend Adriane, Nora's best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora's sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming,was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.
Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.
Wasserman is also the author of the Seven Deadly Sins series, Hacking Harvard, and the Skinned trilogy, which bestselling author Scott Westerfeld called "spellbinding."
Writers Read: Robin Wasserman.
--Marshal Zeringue
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