Judging a book by its cover...

Confession time: I can be swayed by pretty things. That's how I discovered the joys of Patricia A. McKillip and the Girlosophy books. Tonight while gathering links, I ran across these two beauties by Maryrose Wood:

WHY I LET MY HAIR GROW OUT tells the story of Morgan, a heartbroken Connecticut girl who chops off all her hair in a fit of angst after her boyfriend dumps her on the last day of school. Her frantic parents spring into rescue mode and send her on a "let's-help-Morgan-get- over-it" vacation.

Before you can say ow, my butt hurts, Morgan is biking her way across Ireland, where a most unusual accident sends her tumbling back through time to a magic, long-ago word full of faeries and enchantments. She even meets a hunky warrior-dude named Fergus who really knows how to treat a girl who's part goddess — guess who that turns out to be?

***

[How I Found the Perfect Dress finds]..soon-to-be-seventeen-year-old Morgan Rawlinson, snarky Connecticut teen and half-goddess from the long-ago days of Irish lore, takes another wacky romp through the faery realm.

This time it's Colin, her own freckle-faced Irish hottie, who's under a strangely yawn-inducing spell. To save him, Morgan has to find a leprechaun. In Connecticut. And that's only the beginning!

This book has magical prom dress shopping, a rather unusual game of mini-golf, and a special guest appearance by Gene Simmons. Seriously. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did making it all up.

Color me bemused. I may just have to check these two out. (Kiss the Pages has the Fae in it. It's research.)

Dance Party on the 6

Amazing! I want to be on that train.

(This is from Spiritual Cowgirl.)

The Forest Comes Alive...

Hypnotic, surreal, beautiful

Any idea who made this?

In which the poppets come to life

In mindollie's world, the girls have hair like cotton candy where birds come to roost, tiny French babies sit in the pastry, and forlorn robots wait for the rain to come.


She has the sweetest little doll room, too--look at all that detail!

Capsule Prize Reviews: That's Funny

Like the treasures you get in a gumball machine, here are three tiny reviews of odd yet entertaining titles you'll see kicking around the humor section of your local Book Superstore.

A La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers is odd. There's no denying it. Hillary Carlip, acclaimed author and performance artist, has been collecting discarded grocery lists since she was a teen for that voyeuristic glimpse into the writer's life. From there, she's concocted 26 personas, documented by photos and vignettes and preserved here, with the original lists, in all their glory and humanity. Another blogger used the phrase "Amy Sedaris meets Cindy Sherman," and that's the best descriptor I've heard yet. It's weird, yes, and definitely funny (No demographic goes unskewered), but touching and poignant too--so much story is told in a picture and a few hundred words. My favorite? Heather, who finds enlightenment as a Suicide Girl.

Confession: I love dioramas. Who doesn't, you say, aren't they a hipster staple nowadays? No, actually; I love dioramas unironically. A visit to the Museum of Natural History can make my week. That's why Sloane Tanen's Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same is one of my favorite undefinable titles. Sloane photographs tiny yellow Easter chicks in ridiculous settings, with incredible attention to detail and a twisted sense of humor. It's a lot of fun, and you'll want to go out and pick up some chenille chickies of your own to photograph. (LOLChicks? It could happen!)

Simon Doonan's Wacky Chicks was a gift I was reluctant to begin reading, but has become a twice-a-year ritual. Within, Doonan profiles over a dozen modern Auntie Mames, cultured and crazy women with fantastic style and incredible stories. Kazuko designed healing crystal jewelry with the help of her pet sparrow, Bobi Bird. Mary Christmas radically cheerleads at protests. Pearl Harbour took her rockabilly sound to Japan, and came back to do up her apartment like a kitschy bordello. Spider Fawke shares her apartment with dozens of reptiles. (Just like the poster says, these are the dangerous ladies you'd dare to invite to tea.) And Simon Doonan? He celebrates these ladies' eccentricities, and invites the reader to join them in living life out loud.


Extra Bits:

*The A La Cart Blog
*An A La Cart Excerpt, on Fresh Yarn (complete with video!)
*Hillary Carlip's Website (I love her assemblage art)
*Sloane Tanen's Website (check out her tiny yellow chicks in action!)
*Simon Doonan's Website
* Sloan Tanen interview at Tastes Like Chicken
*A sample chapter from Wacky Chicks, all about Amy Sedaris

Do You Doodle?

Today at Barnes and Noble I ran into a display of some rather silly but sweet books, and one in particular caught my eye.



Do you remember the Anti-Coloring Books? They had a little prompt, a little line drawing for setting, and big white spaces for you to imaginatively doodle to your heart's content. Beautiful Doodles, by Nellie Ryan, has the same premise, but it's relentlessly cute, with pages with pet shops to fill, cakes to decorate, and store windows to design and oh, I could go on, but shall link you to the Amazon.co.uk Preview instead.

(And look! A sequel coming out this fall.)

Inspired? When you finish that one, how about Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book, The Girls' Doodle Book, The Boys' Doodle Book, and the Rosie Flo and Johnny Joe coloring books. The last two series especially neat, as you're given outlines of dresses and costumes, with the white space to fill in who's wearing them-and before you rant at me about gender roles, nobody's saying that there's a girl in those frocks or a boy in the wetsuit-so get creative! I'd probably fill mine with giraffe, peacock, dinosaur and bunny people just because I can. (Also because I like dinosaurs.)

You could use them as writing prompts, or work them into art journal and scrapbook layouts. You could photocopy them and pass em around to your friends for semi-ironic fun while waiting for dinner at restaurants. You could cut out little people and make a Paper Doll Window Treatment, a la Mark Montano; see The Big Ass Book of Crafts for details. Oh, the possibilities!

Capsule Prize Reviews: That's Pretty

Like those little plastic bubbles you get for 25 cents, here are some teeny reviews to tide you over until I have the stamina for a long review.

(The answer to Why do you review so many craft books, Rie? is They're shorter, easier to digest, and we get a ton of them at Four-Letter-Third-Wave Magazine.)

Tracy Porter's Inspired Gatherings is surreally decadent and fairy-taleish, taking place in a world where the silverware is crowned with millinery flowers, champagne glasses topped with sugar, and plaster cupids embellished with rhinestones. This book gilds, fluffs, and glitters the lily, and I love it all the more for that. With a candy-colored palette and collagelike approach to decorating, this is so much the Weetzie Bat Guide to Parties, and its over-the-topness makes up for a lack of practicality (though I do like the Snowglobe Party Gift idea--get a clear plastic container and fill it with glitter and tiny treasures.)



Sonya Nimri's Beadalicious takes her DIY ethic to jewelry making. Each piece remakes vintage and thrift shop treasures in fresh ways, with accessories to match every aesthetic. The ethereal type may favor a Blossoming Branch necklace, the grown-up candy raver a Goodnight Moon choker, and the rockabilly teenybopper the Fresh Cherry Drops earrings. Like Just for the Frill of It, the instructions are clear and well-detailed (down to where the vintage bits and bobs are acquired) and the jewelry beautifully presented--I love her books' bright, tropical, summery look. To top it all off, Nimri adds a matching recipe to each piece of jewelry: the Spotlight ring gets Drama Queen Pink Lemonade, the Old Time Button Headband is matched to Peach Button Cookies.

Taking Tea With Alice is another devastatingly pretty book that's all charm and less practicality, but is so much fun that I can't help but pore over it and dream a bit. A guide to Victorian Alice-in-Wonderland themed teas, there are games and a little bit of history and many pictures of well-dressed children and delicious looking tea party fare. I've yet to try out the Butterfly Bites or Frozen Charlotte cake, but the recipes look simple enough for a beginning baker. My favorite bit? The fairy themed Midsummer Night Tea. If you can't get to Alice's Tea Cup (my favorite restaurant in NYC, by the by-best described by the words bohemian, Carrollesque, and thebestsconesinNY), this little title may hold you over.

Extra Bits:
*Tracy Porter's Blog
*Naughty Secretary's interview with Sonya
(And for that matter, check out the Beadalicious Flickr and Etsy Shop)
*Pearls and Tea, a livejournal community for pretty little things. If you like the above books, you'll love it there
*If you combine all three titles, you get An Idea, Perfectly Illustrated by Gala Darling, where she elaborates on how to "dress like a cupcake should feel"
*A Fanciful Twist held a Tiny Tea Party on her blog; if you should ever need inspiration for a daily outfit or fashion sketches, visit the comments
*Oktavia's Neo-Martha has an apartment with all the whimsy of Porter, but in a sort of vintage-bohemian way.
*Do you fancy Nature Baroque? Cocotte is a sweet assemblage series made from blown eggs, insect wings, and teardrops

Nobody Was Quite Sure Where She Came From: The Man With the Dancing Eyes by Sophie Dahl

She spent her childhood in a tall imposing house in Belgravia--alone, but for a host of homely nannies who adored her. Her summers were spent in a crumbling palazzo outside Rome named the Villa Splendida, and her youth passed sweetly, solitary and uninterrupted, until either parent, filled with remorse or longing, would arrive to bewildering fanfare and sweep her off to exotic climes for a week or two.

Mostly she was happiest sitting on top of the Aga, her small nose firmly buried in a book.

Sophie Dahl's The Man With the Dancing Eyes shares a gangly, self aware but wholly appealing quality with its heroine, Pierre. A self-proclaimed modern fairy tale, Pierre finds love with the title character (who remains a fill-in-the-blank, quite on purpose I'd imagine), and loses it, and goes off to find herself before attempting to find it again. Illustrated throughout by Annie Morris with loose, surreally beautiful ink-and-watercolor drawings of Pierre and her love and their quirky supporting cast in a lively meld of text and pictures, it's a unique little reading experience with quite a lot to offer. A number of readers have compared it to a grown-up Eloise at the Plaza, and I'm inclined to agree:

When she was not posing for Mr Chin she would pace the streets of Manhattan, often finding herself in the Mummy Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This became one of her favorite haunts. (She wondered what Ernest, the Freudian, would make of her attachment to mummies.)

Short in length but not in whimsy, The Man With the Dancing Eyes is lovely. Read, as Ms. Dahl herself suggests, "on a melancholic Sunday afternoon swaddled in blankets."

The Man With the Dancing Eyes by Sophie Dahl, illustrated by Annie Morris
Official Website (with excerpts, animations, computer wallpaper and e-cards)
Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Powell's