Published in 1991, and winner of the Anthony Award and the Macavity Award, both for “Best First Mystery,” Murder on the Iditarod Trail chronicles the adventures of a musher (as Iditarod contestants are known) and a State Trooper as the former tries to elude and the latter tries to catch the person responsible for the deaths of three mushers and the maiming of three more. Continue reading →.

Published in July 1814, Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price who has been raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle as charity to her mother who married poorly. Treated as inferior by everyone except her cousin Edmund, Fanny’s gratitude toward Edmund secretly grows into love. As suitors and other lovers come into the picture, the plot thickens and emotions run high in true Austen style. Continue reading →.

Much shorter than Middlemarch, Silas Marner ironically takes a bit longer for the reader to become involved with the story. It starts almost too simply: Silas Marner, a weaver living in a religious community, is unjustly accused of theft, expelled, and becomes a recluse in another small village called Raveloe. Continue reading →.

In site news, we have an updated blog design. It’s a magazine layout and will hopefully help you to better find what you’re looking for. We plan to change the design of the rest of the site to match the blog in the near future. We hope you like it, and please send feedback.

The title of this book is evidently a double entendre–a guess, since pearls are never mentioned in the narrative. However, a string of pearls was and still is a wardrobe staple for the professional woman. A “string of pearls” must also refer to the format of the narrative. It is a collection of vignettes presented in a logical if not always chronological order. As the reader progresses through the stories, he or she realizes that these stories are indeed gems. Continue reading →.

My Ántonia is a story of many people over a long period of time. Many come and go, some stay throughout the narrative, many softly pass into the background and are not spoken of again. While not the tightly structured narrative that was O Pioneers!, My Ántonia is a quiet story that finds its power through simplicity. Continue reading →.

With Emma, Girlebooks now has all of Jane Austen’s novels available for free download in our ebook catalog. First published in 1816, Emma is a comic novel about the “handsome, clever, and rich” title character and the follies surrounding her attempts at matchmaking. In her misguided schemes involving almost everyone’s romantic interests but her own, … Continue reading →.

Published in 1909, Three Lives was Gertrude Stein’s first published work. The book is made up of three stories: “The Good Anna”, “Melanctha”, and “The Gentle Lena”. The three stories are independent of each other, but all are set in the fictional town of Bridgepoint. Continue reading →.

The book is set amidst the detailed and beautiful descriptions of the Great Smokies, and the mountains serve as a silent character, watching all that happens on her soil. The story centers around the Cayce family and Parson Kelsey who get entangled in the politics that surround the hunt for a fugitive. Continue reading →.

At the end of her life, age 40, Margaret Fuller had earned the reputation of being one of the most radical and intellectual persons in the English-speaking world. Her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and her front page reviews and articles in Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune were read by all Americans who wished to keep up with what was most current. Yet Fuller remains invisible in textbooks today. Continue reading →.