My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Magicians is a good reminder of why books written for adults are so much more satisfying than books written for children. Or teenagers. Nothing about it is written for an immature audience, but it pays wonderful homage to the great fantasies that have captivated all ages, and then does one better by catapulting these magical lands into cold hard reality.

For example: What if you DID go to a magical school? How simple do you really think it is, with all the cartoonish elements removed, to cross between the world you have been raised in (and are expected to live in) and the world that you are being educated in, that you are told is better, superior, surpassing anything any other human could ever imagine?

Moreover: what if magic meant every thing you could ever want was available with a feint of your hand and a whisper of an incantation? Could you resist the urges of excess and moral abandon?

And what if you DID get into Narnia, or Wonderland, or Middle-Earth? Would it really be so simple to heft a sword in your hand and go forth on a quest, every moment more and more aware of your mortality?

Quentin Coldwater is one of the elite of New York Public Schools. It’s the fall of his senior year in high school and he’s on the verge of heading off to Harvard, or Princeton, or one of those other ivy-tangled schools, along with the closest things he has to friends, James and James’s lovely girlfriend, Julia.

It doesn’t really matter to Quentin as much as it should. The two things he covets the most, Julia and the imagined world of Fillory, can’t be his. Life is a thing to be gotten through, and when he needs escape, he turns back to his Fillory novels, as he has since he was a child.

Fillory is essentially Narnia, with a few changes to keep it from being an exact copy, but the tributes are clear. And who didn’t have a deeply-buried conviction, as a child, that if we just believed hard enough, we’d stumble into Narnia ourselves one day? Although perhaps that notion is dead and gone by the time we are high school seniors.

And then Quentin finds himself stumbling through a garden, feeling for a wall that isn’t there, and walking from the cold of a November afternoon in Brooklyn to the hot summer sunlight of a green lawn and a great house. It isn’t Fillory, no, but it’s a place just as magical… a school for the training of magicians. An examination booklet open before him on a desk… a chance dangled in front of his nose, if only he’ll give up any notions of a normal life he might have had…

“And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin’s chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign. Jesus, what the hell was he thinking? Of course he was going to sign. This was everything he’d always wanted, the break he’d given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and become a motherfucking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?”

-The Magicians, p 40

But college doesn’t give graduates all the answers, after all, and the strange rigors of a magician’s school don’t, either. What are all-powerful young sorcerers to do with their time, but plunge into the excesses of Manhattan’s underground, throwing away money and time and youth with abandon, knowing that they can make more tomorrow. Quentin and his friends don’t realize it, but they need what all the pre-pubescent champions of Fillory needed to make them adults, a good quest.

Throwing the magical worlds we love into startling, three-dimensional, adult context, The Magicians takes literary fantasy to a new level of sophistication and relevance.

See for yourself! “The Magicians” at Barnes & Noble

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HOLLY LEAVES! I love them.

Every Christmas I give myself a good dose of paint fumes (which really just gives me a headache, nothing exciting), stain a couple of t-shirts by absently wiping my fingers on them, and trade writer’s block for artist’s block: I just painted holly leaves! It’s time for something new! Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!

So I paint Christmas lights and stars, snowflakes and holly leaves, all dancing around the names of people I love.

And the names of people my clients love. This year, I stepped up production a little and went commercial.

MORE holly leaves. But different.

I have ornaments in the window of Homebody Boutique, a gorgeous little shop on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, which is incredibly exciting, but the real business has been online at my Etsy site! Brooklyn Bridge ornaments! Horse-head ornaments! Happy Holidays ornaments! For friends, for relatives, for horse trainers, dance teachers, for stable boarders, for co-workers!

I can’t even get a Christmas tree yet! The collapsible table that I use as a work desk? Yeah, that’s in the corner where the Christmas tree has to go.

Brooklyn Bridge for a lark.. very popular!

I started working on ornaments back in October, thinking that people would put up their Christmas trees around Thanksgiving and start ordering then. I was completely wrong. People start ordering the first week of December, apparently! I was just resigning myself to a slow season when boom, orders started rolling in!

But I really love Christmas lights!

So I’m going to start shaking up paint pens and get on an old t-shirt that can take a few streaks of red and green, gold and silver. And if you want an ornament. . . just let me know! I’m here all season.

Etsy: Holly Jolly Holidays

I also made this banner for use on my CreateSpace e-store:

CreateSpace gives you an “e-store” to sell your book from, in addition to Amazon. It isn’t an impressive site, but the royalties are twice what they give authors selling from Amazon. If I sold a hundred copies a month from my e-store, I’d actually have the equivalent of a part-time job.

At McDonald’s.

In Arkansas.

So then I thought about selling the book directly through my website, but after I did the numbers and looked at shipping, it seems like a better deal for everyone to do it through the CreateSpace storefront.

It will be available on Amazon in a few days, too. But any link from me will go to the CreateSpace page!

I think that the paperback is the way to go, and will open up the book to a lot of people who had read the great reviews but just aren’t buying e-books. Is a $12.95 paperback a better deal than a $2.99 e-book?

Well, do you have to pay an extra hundred bucks just to buy the reader for the paperback? I thought not. I’m not an e-book person, what can I say?

In the meantime, though, to celebrate the paperback release, the e-book remains priced at 99 cents at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords through the end of the month. (At Smashwords, you can download every version, including HTML and PDF, and authors get a better cut.)

The horse in the banner ad, by the way, is a Thoroughbred who was boarded at the old Grand Cypress Equestrian Center in Orlando, Florida, back when I was a manager there. I forget his name, but he was darling. His owner never forgot for a second that he had been a racehorse; she was so proud of his heritage!

I got a bit sniffly thinking about the books I’d hoarded for years. My husband and I have always been sort of mad book collectors, cackling with delight in the basement of the Strand when we found a UK edition of The Ground Beneath Her Feet or, memorably, a copy of A Feast for Crows, water-damaged but quite readable, about a week after its hardcover release, on a sidewalk dollar-book cart. Since we’ve both worked as booksellers for years, we had shelves and shelves of ARCs. (ARC=Advance Review Copy). Some we’d never even read.

And then we moved, and we didn’t have room for all of our books in the little truck, and we just… left them.

It made sense, of course. We were going to New York City; it would be fun to find our old books all over again. I’ve replaced a few just walking down the street (Park Slopers are so nice about leaving their old books out for passers-by!) and gained several shelves worth of new books just from stoops, the Salvation Army, and thrift stores.

But there are some books that I think about sadly. The signed ARC of Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis. (It’s signed to Natalie, so if you find it, hah, I just halved the value.) The ARC of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Basically just a lot of ARCs.

I once based an art project on this cover. The art project, I still have. The book, alas, is gone.

There were my Florida books. Pineapple Press hardcovers of Patrick D. Smith’s Florida stories. A crumbling paperback of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s autobiography, Voice of the River, who I admired because she loved the same things I loved: swamps, white egrets, afternoon thunderclouds.

My childhood friends, Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, and The Black Stallion accounted for one entire box of their own. Now gone. Those gorgeous old yellow editions of Little House on the Prairie. Those strange white late 80s editions of The Chronicles of Narnia. Left behind.

Click here for the American paperback edition — also gorgeous!

On my shelves now, some survivors. That UK edition of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. (It’s just beautiful!) The ARC of Julian Gough’s adorable, lovely Juno and Juliet. The green paperback of my favorite book on the planet, Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other. A dizzying collection of signed hardcovers and ARCs by that dizzying Florida writer Tim Dorsey. A first edition, carefully wrapped in a plastic library jacket, of Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio. 

You are my favorite book, sir.

And some new arrivals that I just love. A paperback ARC of Wildwood. From the lobby of my building, Jane Smiley’s very horsey debut Barn Blind. From a stoop in Park Slope, Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance in pristine hard-cover. A tattered copy of Vicki and the Black Horse, by the greatest illustrator the horse world has ever known, Sam Savitt.

Looking at my shelves, in fact, I can see that some of these street-finds are true gems. I think they might be worthy of their own blog post in the future. For now, they help me when I mourn the loss of old friends. And don’t worry, darlings. I’ll never give you up.

Canterwood Crest’s first novel opens with a nervous Sasha’s internal debate on lip gloss.

I paused in my reading.

I was looking for a horse book, here, after all. There was a picture on the front of a girl (admittedly, a little sloe-eyed for a tween) wearing a hard-hat and holding the reins of a horse. I wasn’t particularly interested in the emotional dilemmas of a middle school boarding school student, at least, not the ones that didn’t pertain to horses. And in my experience, horse girls just didn’t worry about lip gloss.

What experience? Well, I grew up around horses. From elementary school to high school, I was surrounded by other horse-crazy girls. We walked or begged rides from school to the barn every afternoon. We rode hard, critiqued and insulted one another, and helped each other up when we got dumped. We did our homework (when we remembered) sitting around the stable picnic table. We got home late, ate leftovers from the family dinner we’d missed, showered, and collapsed into bed. On weekends, we worked twelve-hour shifts at a nearby breeding farm, mucking out stalls and stacking hay bales. There was no time for lip gloss. There was no time to worry about boys, or popularity. There was no time for anything. Except horses.

So, Miss Sasha Silver, why on earth are you worried about lip gloss? You’ve just been admitted to Canterwood, a top-tier boarding school with an elite equestrian team; boys shouldn’t even enter the picture.

Click through to see the paperback from Barnes & Noble

Maybe things have changed for girls, or maybe Sasha just got lucky that she could have both. Because she determines that at Canterwood, she’s going to be horsey and popular. And it’s a good thing, too. If she just relied on her equestrian teammates to keep her sane, she never would have made it through her first month.

In some ways, Take The Reins is the most accurate horse story ever written. Everything is perfect in life, except for the horse part. Sasha’s roommate is perfect and amazing. Sasha’s schoolwork is challenging, but she’s capable. Sasha’s crush actually seems like he’s into her. Socially and academically, Sasha is succeeding.

But in the stable, she hasn’t been there ten minutes before she has got herself her very own nemesis, a talented rider named Heather, who doesn’t want any competition for a coveted spot on the advanced team. Heather quickly proves that she is willing to go to insane lengths, even putting her own horse in danger, to stop Sasha from challenging her supremacy as top rider. Her tricks are cruel and clever, and somehow Sasha finds it impossible to prove to the riding coach that the girl is causing trouble. And so Sasha’s Canterwood life, so attractive on the academic end, seems to be collapsing around her at the equestrian end.

As I read about Sasha’s determination to protect her horse, stave off attacks from Heather, and balance riding with studying in order to prepare for the advanced team auditions, Take The Reins suddenly became very realistic to me. All the girls in Canterwood’s equestrian team loved their horses, loved riding, and were desperate to prove themselves. That much is familiar.  I knew these girls. I’d grown up with these girls. I’d been these girls. And after I realized that, Take The Reins was a page-turner to the very end.

The entire Canterwood Crest series is also available online from Amazon.com:

It’s not that I’m a holiday fanatic, it’s that I spent a year working at Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe in Liberty Square, a little corner of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom that specializes in holiday gear year-round. I listened to Christmas music, year-round. I stocked, sold, and recommended Christmas ornaments, year-round. I wished folks a “Happy Holidays!” year-round. (And I swept up the fragments of broken glass, year-round.)

I actually didn’t grow up in a household that celebrated holidays until I was about fifteen years old, so my anticipation to hum Christmas carols and deck my apartment with holly and pine boughs really dates back to my days in a colonial gown and mobcap, selling Christmas to tourists in tank tops and sunburns.

But the best bit of Disney Christmas cheer that I have is the tradition of painting Christmas ornaments. And this year my favorite Yuletide hobby is going out on the town: I’ll have hand-painted ornaments hanging in the window of a neighborhood boutique in Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue shopping district.

This is so thrilling for me. Brooklyn is a town of artists and while I think my writing is on par with my famous neighbors’ (yeah, I do think so!) I wasn’t sure I could produce a work of art that would be considered boutique-worthy in such a talented town. I’m already planning new designs based around the borough we love: the Brooklyn Bridge, a skyline, cats (everyone in this town, myself included, has a cat), subway trains… it’s so much fun!

In the meantime, here are a few of my current designs. If you aren’t in town, they’ll be available on Etsy as well.

Christmas lights and holly designs.

Wedding favor and 1st Christmas/stars

Christmas lights and snowflakes

I had already found MoveOn.org’s constant e-mails to be deeply annoying. To receive an e-mail from them asking me to help lower the rent on a privately held bookstore, at the exact moment when I was coming to terms with the fact that my own bookstore dreams were going to have to be put on a very far away backburner, was just insult to injury. I unsubscribed from MoveOn.org’s mailing list right away. To be asked to support a failing bookstore, when I was putting my business plan in a file to grow dusty and yellow? Why don’t you just rub a little salt in, while you’re at it.

ames sf's flickr

After all, there was no mention of what St. Mark’s was going to do to increase sales and profit margin after they got their rent reduction. And I didn’t see any reason for a landlord to subsidize a bookstore. There was a reason that they got themselves in the hole, I thought. And there was no reason to believe that they were going to change their ways when they could just turn to the public and say, “Please keep us open.”

In fact, I would have preferred to see some sort of public campaign to, say, buy books at St. Mark’s. Or at any independent bookstore. With the exception of certain self-published titles (you know, like mine) you can get anything you want from an independent bookstore. You can even download e-books from them. You can order online from them. People’s preference to avoid bookstores at all costs is curious to me, given that shopping for books is one of the most quiet and restful shopping experiences one could engage in. (Unless you’re in a Barnes & Noble in a neighborhood with a lot of children, but then again, that makes my indie store argument even more solid.) Generally, people love the idea of bookstores, but they only go inside for coffee and to trash the newsstand. And St. Mark’s doesn’t have coffee. Do they?

It turns out that the petition has driven up business, so I suppose a free marketing campaign is a good a business plan as any other. The Village Voice reported yesterday that: “[Co-owner Bob] Contant said that the store doesn’t have a fallback plan. ‘We’re extremely disappointed that nothing can be done,’ he said. He clarified that the store is not in danger of immediately closing, as business has been extremely good for the last two months, spurred by the outpouring of support for the bookshop in the community.”

So, there, even though the landlord has decided not to drop the rent by $5,000 a month, St. Mark’s ought to be able to figure that out, since business is up. Good.

Or not.

As reported in the Village Voice, Jeremiah Moss from Vanishing New York found that the Cooper Union not only denied them the rent reduction, that informed them they’d really like to be getting $40,000 a month from that space. Contant told Publisher’s Weekly they’ll be using the next seven years on their lease looking for a new location.

$40,000 a month. In the East Village. Didn’t that used to be a cultural hotspot?

Who can afford to pay $40,000 a month? A bank can afford it. Starbucks can afford it. Marc Jacobs can afford it. Do we need more of those? No, we don’t.

-Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York

Moss has started a new petition asking people to boycott whatever new business moves into the space after St. Mark’s gets the boot.

Sarmale / O.'s flickr

And this is where my opinion of the situation changes. For me, this has ceased to be about bookshops. This has ceased to be about the state of bookselling today, or whether or not St. Mark’s needs to draft a new business plan. This is about the continuing loss of New York City’s vibrant, unique businesses, which are what made this a city that stands apart from all others, and which are disappearing at an alarming rate, to be filled in by the same run-of-the-mill stores that line the bland suburban malls you so desperately ran away from when you moved to New York.

The state of real estate and small business in Manhattan is a sad, sad thing, and it’s only a matter of time before the chain stores and homogenization that have made a once-unique city into such a glossy, soulless mall make their way across the river and into Brooklyn. Brooklyn, where independent bookstores are thriving and expanding. Brooklyn, where you might actually have to check your GPS if you wanted to find a Starbucks. Brooklyn, where glass towers of condos with first-floor Duane Reades (owned by Walgreens) are slowly replacing rowhouses and family drugstores.

I used to live in Manhattan. And it was cool. That was the best word for it. Now, I find trips to my old neighborhood depressing. The 24-hour bakery which satisfied my pregnancy cravings for chocolate cake at midnight is a Bank of America. The streets are lined with multi-national chains. With all the outposts of Gap, Urban Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, and the Limited, it’s a wonder that the streets aren’t full of people wearing the exact same outfits.

Jeremiah Moss says it best in his blog:

Sign the petition if you love St. Mark’s Books. Sign it if you just love books. Sign it if you’re sick and tired of watching New York City’s cultural touchstones go down the toilet day after day. Sign it if you miss the East Village before it became a frat house. Sign it if you don’t like the way Cooper Union contributes to real estate overdevelopment in the neighborhood. Sign it if you hate having a bank on every corner and a chain store on every other. Sign it if you’re sick of bumping into brainless zombies with their faces buried in electronic devices. Sign it because you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore!

And, yes, of course–go buy some books while you’re at it.

The petition is here: http://signon.org/sign/boycott-coopers-future

My introduction to blogging came from writing about horses, first at my own farm, Union Square Stables, where we bred Thoroughbreds, and then through Retired Racehorse Blog, which I started as a project to chronicle the re-training of a Thoroughbred racehorse.

O'Malley, a hopeful retiree.

In the process of training Final Call, the OTTB (Off-Track Thoroughbred) from racehorse to sporthorse, I made many connections in the Thoroughbred racing industry as well as the retirement agencies that work to place Thoroughbreds at the end of the racing career in new homes and new careers.

As Retired Racehorse Blog evolved from a training blog to an industry blog, the disconnect between racing and retirement became more and more upsetting to me. That’s why I was so excited by CANTER New England’s Suffolk Showcase.

CANTER, a leading Thoroughbred retirement agency, managed to partner with the trainers at Suffolk Downs, Boston’s racetrack, to produce a showcase day where sporthorse enthusiasts and trainers could enter the usually off-limits “backside” of the racetrack and see the horses that trainers feel are done with their racing careers. CANTER New England manages to put two very different worlds together for one day a year, in the name of finding great new homes for retiring racehorses.

I feel very lucky to have partnered with CANTER New England and provide publicity for the Suffolk Showcase, which took place on Sunday, October 23rd. This was always the goal of Retired Racehorse Blog: to help connect sporthorse enthusiasts with race trainers and owners. Three days of posting about horses that would be available for viewing at the Suffolk Showcase, as well as a guest post from CANTER New England volunteer Jennifer Montfort on how the entire process worked, was exceedingly well-received.

Retired Racehorse Blog had its biggest three days of traffic, with nearly one thousand views! I’m so thrilled that my little blog had such a big part in helping retired racehorses find new homes, and I can’t wait to double that number next year.

“Hannah’s Home” tells the story of a very compelling woman—equal parts tough broad, soft-hearted hairdresser, dedicated horsewoman, farmer to her core—who is forced to rebuild her life from the ground up, and finds home in the process.

Hannah's Home by MaryAnn Myers

Hannah is on her own. Well, not entirely. Her husband may have disappeared, but Hannah has the warmth of the small town she lives in, a circle of close friends who love her, and a leopard Appaloosa named for Billy Bob Thornton. And now, she has bought her own farm. Sure, it’s falling apart. Sure, there’s this sourpuss elderly man who is always appearing on her doorstep and calling her the worst insult a farmer can think of: “City Girl.” Sure, she isn’t sure how she’ll afford the mortgage AND food AND her horse.

But Hannah’s a tough country woman. Hannah will manage. Tough country women always manage. Spend enough time around horses, and you’ll meet women like Hannah. They’re practical. They’re fiercely independent. They’ve been let down, they’ve been disappointed, and they don’t have any expectations of princes on white horses coming to their rescue. As long as she has her horse and her truck, this kind of woman can handle anything that comes her way. In Hannah’s case, she’ll roll up her sleeves and move into a crumbling farmhouse (some people say it’s haunted) and ignore all the nay-sayers who tell her the whole place is just going to collapse around her ears.

Surrounding Hannah’s little tumble-down homestead is the rural community she’s spent her whole life in. Small town America is depicted in all its afghan-quilted, pie-on-the-windowsill glory, and if you’ve ever lived out in the boondocks, you might just find yourself missing it a little. From meeting the girls for Chili Night at the Honky Tonk to sweet-talking the prices down from the local junker, from overseeing the wakes at the town funeral parlor to building a small pie-baking empire, from a solitary tuna fish sandwich for dinner to boisterous pot-lucks with friends, “Hannah’s Home” embraces the warmth and comfort of life in small town America.

Just don’t read this book while you’re hungry. There’s enough comfort food in here to empty your pantry.

Get your copy! Hannah’s Home is Available in Kindle and Paperback here at Amazon.