What Am I Reading Now?

I've fallen behind on my What Am I Reading Now updates. I got behind while moving into a new house over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays and then trying to settle into my new home. But I did, indeed, continue to read during that time! Most of my print books were "somewhere" in packing boxes, so I've been relying on my iPad Kindle app to keep me entertained. Between Christmas and the middle of February, I reread three of my favorite books from childhood: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, The Five Little Peppers Midway, and The Five Little Peppers Grown Up, all by Margaret Sidney. It's always a treat to discover that a book that was a favorite "then" (whenever "then" might be) is still a favorite when you read it again, and so it was for the Five Little Peppers books. These books were written in the late 19th/early 20th Century and have an old time feel with old time values. They may not be fast paced enough for kids today, but when I was a little girl, I wanted to grow up to be just like Polly Pepper. :-)

(Note: The Five Little Peppers series is free on Kindle, but be aware that whoever uploaded them failed to format them properly for e-books, and to say that the formatting is "haywire" is a vast understatement. I loved the stories enough not to mind, but it may bother "new" readers. The formatting in print versions is, to my knowledge, just fine.)

Okay, on to my current "read." The Winter Sea, by Susanna Kearsley, was recommended to me by a good friend who thought (correctly) that I might be interested in the early 18th Century Jacobites (those who wanted to restore the descendants of James II Stewart to the throne of England after James had been driven out of England for being a Catholic king in Protestant England). Here is the back cover blurb:

In the spring of 1708, an invading Jacobite fleet of French and Scottish soldiers nearly succeeded in landing the exiled James Stewart in Scotland to reclaim his crown.

Now, Carrie McClelland hopes to turn that story into her next bestselling novel. Settling herself in the shadow of Slains Castle, she creates a heroine named for one of her own ancestors and starts to write.

But when she discovers her novel is more fact than fiction, Carrie wonders if she might be dealing with ancestral memory, making her the only living person who knows the truth-the ultimate betrayal-that happened all those years ago, and that knowledge comes very close to destroying her.

Stop by on Tuesday and I'll share a Tuesday Teaser with you from The Winter Sea.