Howling Frog Books

 The Clackity, by Lora Senf The Nighthouse Keeper I was recommended this title by Leila at Bookshelves of Doom , who is on Substack now.  I'm so glad I read it, and I can't wait to get my hands on The Loneliest Place , the final book in the Blight Harbor trilogy, which comes out soon. Blight Harbor is the seventh-most-haunted town in America, so Evie has become familiar with the supernatural since she moved to town a few years ago to live with her Aunt Des.  But she's never been allowed to explore the old abattoir on the other side of town; that place is haunted in a very bad way.  Des, however, has a job to do there, and Evie witnesses her disappearance.  To get Des back, Evie has to make a deal with the Clackity, the monster that inhabits the place, and go through to the other side of reality on a quest. Under a dark sun, Evie has just hours to find her way through seven houses and rescue her aunt from the even worse monster pursuing her.  She has a few tools to use, and

 The Strange Library, by Haruki Murakami This is a funky little story -- at just 72 pages long, with a lot of artwork, it's a short story, not a novel.  It's a bit like somebody let Tim Holz illustrate it, but in fact the marbled papers and illustrations come from books found in the London Library (which I am still bitter about not being allowed to visit). Our narrator, an unnamed boy, just wants to return his library books and ask for a new one.  He's directed to room 107, in the cellar, and soon he is imprisoned and on a strange adventure.  Assisted by a mysterious girl and a sheep man, he meets all sorts of dangers; will he ever get home to his mother? An intriguing read, sometimes hard on the eyes (pale grey ink on magenta, whose idea was that?), and worth the time, which isn't much. 

  The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes, ill. by Edward Ardizzon e I picked up this titles from the discard table, largely because of the Ardizzone illustrations.  I like to collect Ardizzone and will grab whatever I can (same for Trina Schart Hyman).  And soon I happily grabbed a matching book, The Alley , so I'll read that soon too!  I like Estes just fine, but usually you only see The Hundred Dresses.  I'd never heard of The Witch Family. This is an utterly charming story!  If you have a witch-loving little girl in your vicinity, get this story for her right away.  Amy and her best friend Clarissa love to sit together and draw pictures, and Amy has decreed that Old Witch must be banished.  She has been too wicked, and she must be banished to the Glass Hill, there to live all alone.  If she behaves herself, Amy will let her out for Halloween.  But Amy doesn't wish to be too tough on Old Witch, so she lets Little Witch Girl and Weeny Witch go to live with Old Witch...and Litt

  Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans, by Jane Marie This is an expose of MLMs -- multi-level marketing schemes -- which are pyramid schemes that keep just within the letter of the law.   You know them: Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, Arbonne, Doterra, Lularoe, and many many others.  Some are more respectable than others, but they all promise you the ability to run your own business from home, be independent, and make money at your own pace.  The trouble is that the product they're selling, whatever it is, is not where the profit lies; that's in your downline.  The more people you recruit to be sellers, the more money you'll make, but as the layers add up, the money runs out.  The people at the top make plenty, but you won't; in fact, you'll probably lose money and end up with a basement full of product you can't move. Marie dissects the biggest MLM companies, analyzing how they attract people (predominantly moms looking for flexible ways

Glow-in-the-dark ink!!  Moonbound, by Robin Sloane  Two hundred or so years from now, human civilization -- called the Anth -- will be at an apex, with incredible technologies and problem-solving.  And they've discovered how to time-travel; at least, how to send information through time, and they build constructs called dragons to send through time.  When the dragons return, they have gone mad, and they envelop the Earth in dust.  The ensuing war destroys nearly everything. 11,000 years later, a boy lives in a village owned by the wizard Malory.  Ariel was born to live a story, but he goes off-script...and now anything can happen. I loved Moonbound, and read it in two long sessions.  This is amazing storytelling, and fantastic SF too.  I liked Sloane's first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , but this is a whole new level for Sloane.  (Plus I got a limited, hand-printed zine, which made me happy.)  This is an excellent novel, highly recommended, and you should read

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch .  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.   For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons would try to

 While I was walking, I kept finding connections to Diana Wynne Jones books.  I was not expecting this, and I didn't get it into my daily journal posts.  But right from the first day, as we hiked up from Avebury along the herepath, I kept thinking of various DWJ stories.  That herepath looked just like the Shield of Oreth, except it wasn't hot -- but the rain was just the same, sweeping up the hillside in curtains.  Not that I managed to take a photo of what it really looked like! Of course, Dalemark's green roads are the same idea as old paths like the Ridgeway -- and they're often called green roads too.  At some point in the Dalemark books, someone explains that the green roads are out of the way because they are so old, and tend to go places that people don't live any more, which again is very close to the actual case. (As an aside, I felt a lot of sympathy for Moril too on that trip.  I very frequently felt much too hot indoors!  It was warm, sunny weather, and