Antigone Books

• Spellman Files
• Curse Of The Spellmans
• Revenge Of The Spellmans
• By Lisa Lutz

  These books chronicle a family of private investigators who often use their talents and equipment to get the goods on each other. The narrator is Isabel Spellman, a thirty-ish (yet still so very much an adolescent) middle-child with an intense sense of her own privacy and absolutely no respect for anyone else's. I have rarely laughed so much at one book, much less three.

Keats, the narrator, is a boy between two sisters. When their parents hire a male nanny, Keats is thrilled. The "manny" is ingenious, delightful, funny, inventive and, with his example, Keats learns to be "interesting" himself.

This is a magical book about time, change, history, friendship, and the nature of youth & age.

Set in 1958, the book opens as Tom is being sent to stay with relatives while his brother is sick with measles. Tom's aunt & uncle live in a big house that has been converted into flats, standing in the middle of a housing development. But at night, Tom finds that it is a single-family house surrounded by an enormous garden in which he finds many places to play, as well as a new friend.

The writing is outstanding. The book is a fantasy that never leaves a very familiar world, and it is absorbing. I read it in one sitting, and then I read it again!

This book is based on a class called The Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita that Ram Dass taught at the Naropa Institute in 1974. His detailed class notes provided a framework onto which he has added the observations and wisdom accumulated over the intervening thirty years. The book is a fascinating look at the Gita and could be used as a home self-study guide. But more than that, Ram Dass has brought to life the different ways that Hindu teachings have brought people closer to the Divine. His descriptions are vivid, his exercises are clear, and the supplemental materials provide concrete ways for the student/reader to expand understanding. This is a truly marvelous book.

In The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett introduced a fabulous new heroine, Tiffany Aching. She saved her little brother and a neighbor's son from the Queen of the Fairies, wielding only her wits and a cast iron frying pan. She was also aided by the wee free men, a group of six-inch pictsies with antisocial tendencies.

In A Hat Full Of Sky, Tiffany's adventures continue as she is stalked by a malevolent, disembodied creature. Once again, her native good sense and the wee free men are her only weapons. These books are funny and suspenseful and sly parodies of our society.