Month: November 2016

Farewell Autumn: A Tribute to My Favorite Season

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The days are shorter, the trees are bare, and far too much turkey has been consumed. This can only mean one thing: it’s almost December!

December is a bittersweet month for me. It brings the joys of Christmas, of course, which is my favorite holiday, but it also means the end of another one of my favorite things – autumn. I love everything about autumn – the weather, the changing of the leaves, the food (anyone for pumpkin pie?) – and while I am incredibly excited for Christmas, I am also rather sad to be leaving fall behind.

Therefore, with winter looming ever closer, I thought I would put together a bit of a quote and photo diary as a tribute to my favorite season. All of the photos you’ll see below were taken by me this fall at Greenfield Village, which is a massive outdoor history museum located in Dearborn, Michigan. It is home to a variety of famous historical buildings, such as Abraham Lincoln’s courthouse, Thomas Edison’s lab, Robert Frost’s home, and the farmhouse in which Noah Webster wrote the dictionary. Continue reading “Farewell Autumn: A Tribute to My Favorite Season” →

Fit for a Queen: Victoria by Daisy Goodwin

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book-coverTitle: Victoria: A Novel of a Young Queen

Author: Daisy Goodwin

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Length: 416 pages

Release Date: November 22, 2016

Summary (from Goodreads): In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria – sheltered, small in stature, and female – became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina — Drina to her family — had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone. One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria’s private secretary. Perhaps he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband….
Drawing on Victoria’s diaries as well as her own brilliant gifts for history and drama, Daisy Goodwin, author of the bestselling novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter as well as creator and writer of the new PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria, brings the young queen even more richly to life in this magnificent novel.

Disclaimer:  This is an advertisement for SheSpeaks/St. Martins Press.

There have been a lot of exciting books released so far this year, and Daisy Goodwin’s Victoria, which comes out next Tuesday, is one I have been anticipating for a while now. Anyone who reads this blog will know how much I love historical fiction, and combine that with my love of the English monarchy and what could go wrong?! Continue reading “Fit for a Queen: Victoria by Daisy Goodwin” →