This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

It's causing me pain that I am not reading all of these books this very moment. Also, I need to vacuum my rug.


The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, essays on science fiction by Samuel R. Delany
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Out of Left Field, by Liza Ketchum
Wild Things! Acts of Mischief in Children's Literature, by Betsy Bird, Julie Danielson, and Peter D. Sieruta
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Birthmarked, by Caragh M. O'Brien
Window on the Square, "a novel of suspense" (according to the cover) by Phyllis A. Whitney
The Other Side of Silence, by Margaret Mahy (how is there a Margaret Mahy novel I haven't read yet?)
A reduced bound manuscript I'm reading for blurbing that it now occurs to me I haven't gotten the okay to blog about. Sorry, I'm not being mysterious on purpose, I just don't have the time to retake the picture :o)

New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy died on Monday, July 23. She was 76 years old.

Margaret Mahy could write emotions like sadness, fear, the desperateness of courage, so that you felt them as you read. A few lines from Alchemy (2004):

Certainly the sound of her sadness had spread itself backward and forward through time.

The feeling he had been trying to create – the feeling that the day was just another day – began to shiver out of line.

He could not see an inch beyond his nose. Squinting down in its general direction, he found he could not even see his nose. All the same, still whistling and hissing to himself, reminding himself how real he was, then nodding and muttering agreement with himself, Roland stepped forward yet again, before pausing and groping backward.
She described physical sensations brilliantly. In these lines from 24 Hours (2000), Ellis wakes up with a hangover:

Ellis did not open his eyes. It seemed safer to linger in the darkness behind his lids, for his head felt as …