Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

I'd heard about this because of the similarities to Twilight, and there's a (nasty) new HBO show based on the series. It's a murder mystery series where the main character is a young woman who can read minds, falls in love with a vampire, and learns how to use her ability (or disability, as she calls it, since everyone in her rural northern Louisiana town thinks she's crazy because of it) to solve crimes - for humans and vampires. There's even a love triangle with a werewolf - I think it was actually written before Twilight. It's clever and entertaining enough, but the language and content is quite...adult. I'm not sure whether or not I'll read the sequels (there are 8 or 9 books with these characters).

Kenyon read it, too, since a coworker loaned him a copy just a few days after I put it on hold at the library. He HATED it. Part of that was retaliatory - his coworker hated Twilight, which Kenyon liked, and offered this book as an alternative. He thought it was boring and the characters were shallow and uninteresting, I think.

Dark Lord of Derkholm - Diana Wynne Jones

I totally enjoyed this book. It's young adult fantasy, but it's also a satire of fantasy - the inhabitants of a magical world have been forced to enact stereotypical fantasy roles and activities in order to provide entertainment for tourists from a world like ours. The characters' responses to these roles are pretty funny. There's a lot of heart and humanity in the story - emotionally, it's actually pretty deep. It was so fun to read, and gave me plenty of real things to think about beyond, you know, the elves, griffins, and flying horses and whatnot.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See

This was an excellent book. It's set very convincingly in 19th century provincial China and written as the memoirs of an 80-year-old women recording her memories in the secret women's writing developed in that area. The narrative voice is consistent and authentic sounding, and the story is detailed and human with interesting, flawed characters. I'd heard of foot-binding, but I didn't really comprehend the risks, the extent of the resulting deformity, or what the final product was (feet 4 inches long, coming to a point, with the four small toes broken and bent to curve under the foot and the bones of the arch broken and forced upwards). Terrifying, and also just one of the ways in which women of that society were crippled (girls and women left the upper rooms of their homes only a handful of times per year).

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle - Avi

A quick read, young-adult novel. The protagonist is an 18th (early 19th?) century thirteen-year-old girl stuck crossing the Atlantic alone on a ship with a cruel captain and a mutinous crew out for revenge. Naturally, she ends up rejecting her stuffy Victorian upbringing, donning sailor's garb and joining the crew. It was a fun, extremely well-written and engaging message of empowerment.