What Happens in the Librarians' Meeting...

Every month, the librarians get together to go over all sorts of business, and one of the things we try to do regularly is share information on books we have read so that we are all able to help patrons find good books from any genre. We all read a lot, but we can't read everything, so this really helps. This aspect of our jobs goes by the catchy name "Reader's Advisory" or RA for short. We recently started to do something called "5 Minute RA" which allows to cover one or two books we highly recommend. This morning I talked about two of the most books by Julia Quinn, one of my favorite romance authors. Notes from my presentation are below, and I have it on good authority that the actual books will be back on the shelf any minute now...

5 Minute RA
Julia Quinn
What Happens in London
Ten Things I Love About You

Brief review of plots

What Happens in London:
Lady Olivia Bevelstoke is a staggeringly beautiful debutante whose intelligence often overlooked (She reads the entire newspaper, “every page, every day!”) Being at loose ends, Olivia begins to spy on her quiet (secretive?) new next door neighbor, Sir Harry Valentine, who reportedly murdered his fiancé. Sir Harry works for Home Office translating sensitive documents due to his fluency in both Russian and French. He knows she’s spying, but writes her off as nosy twit. Then the Home Office asks HIM to spy on HER since she is being courted by a Russian prince. True love ensues, with some tense moments due to the not-so-nice prince and the kind of nefarious plots that inevitably surround Russian nobility.

Ten Things I Love About You:
Miss Annabel Winslow is a young lady (country gentry) in London to find a wealthy husband, due to her family’s financial difficulties. She is staying with her grandparents, who are friendly with the Earl of Newbury, whose heir is his nephew Sebastian Grey. The Earl hates his nephew and is desperate to sire an heir, and so is in the market for a young woman with childbearing hips, and decides Annabel will do nicely. She has no desire to marry the Earl, but her family needs the money soon or her brothers will have to leave Eton. She meets Sebastian at a party, a flirtation follows, the Earl becomes incensed, blows are exchanged, Sebastian plays at courting Annabel to rescue her reputation, they fall in love, causing much mayhem in the process, and after a timely intervention by Annabel’s dragon of a grandmother, the couple lives happily ever after.

Both contain a “book within the book” subplot – a very entertaining spoof of genre.

Julia Quinn
Graduated from Harvard; began writing her first novel to avoid the studying involved a rather round about route to medical school. She consequently ditched the idea of an MD and has written over twenty novels including the 8 volume Bridgerton Family series. Many are in this library, more in UHLS, and several in OverDrive.

~Macaire