Reading, reading, reading

I've been reading a lot lately. I inherited a hand-me-down Kindle Fire at work, and I've been loving it. It's another thing to carry around, but it fits in my purse (currently a Vera Bradley backpack), so I can carry it anywhere, and it's a better reading experience than the iPhone, although I still do read on the iPhone in a pinch. I also downloaded some of my favorite jigsaw puzzle apps onto the Kindle, so I can do that as well.

The last few books I've read, I've really loved, and they weren't bestsellers, and I just ran across them by accident, so I wanted to pass the information along.

The first two books I wanted to recommend are by Sarah Painter: The Language of Spells and The Secrets of Ghosts. I was originally interested because of the covers. I really loved them. You can't always judge a book by its cover, and I try not to, but sometimes there are books with covers so beautiful that I really want to love them, and just can't. That wasn't the case here. I really did love both the covers and the books. Both of the books are ebooks only, and they are $.99 each, a huge bargain.

In the first book, The Language of Spells, Gwen Harper inherits a house from a great aunt that she barely knew. Her mother was a fortuneteller, they were constantly moving. The inheritance comes at the perfect time, since she is basically homeless, but it thrusts her back to her hometown and bad memories, and into a world of magic that she had tried to leave behind. Her sister still lives in the old hometown, and there is bad blood between them. Her sister doesn't want magic to touch her family (particularly her daughter Katie), and thus, wants nothing to do with Gwen, but she turns out to need her and her powers when a crisis arises. There is also a love interest in the person of the attorney she meets with to arrange things, who turns out to be an old boyfriend.

The second book, Secrets of Ghosts, is basically Katie's story. Due to events that came to pass in the first book, Katie is super cautious, never taking any kind of risk or chance. She also believes that the family magic has passed her by, but it turns out that she does have a version of the family gift, or as it is more usually referred to, the family curse. It just manifests differently in her.

I just thought both of these books were really lovely, very well written, suspenseful, and delightful overall. Very much worth reading, and definitely worth the $.99 price.