The Orange Swan Review

New Year’s Eve is approaching, I’d like to review something thematically in keeping with the occasion, and my spent 2006 planner is sitting ...

I've been meaning to write a special Christmas-themed review about O. Henry's The Gifts of the Magi and four of his other short sto...

Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a novel about the life and career of an orphan boy born in eighteenth century Paris. ...

Witch Child by Celia Rees is a young adult novel about a seventeenth-century English girl, Mary. The woman who raised Mary and whom Mary ca...

I found out about the novel Sunshine , by young adult fantasy writer Robin McKinley by visiting McKinley's web site . Upon reading the e...

Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is a novel about a man who is a Vietnam vet, a politician, the product of a troubled family, and the...

Anne De Courcy’s The Viceroy’s Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters is a biography of three English sisters – Irene Curzon (1896-1966...

Cathie Pelletier's novel Once Upon A Time On the Banks employs a structure I particularly like. I have a fondness for the ensemble nove...

As Beryl Markham is not well-known, I should probably begin by saying Markham (1902-1986) was Kenya’s first female bush pilot, the first per...

I have a confession to make here [pauses to take a deep, tremulous breath]. My name is Orange Swan, and I’m a L.M. Montgomery geek. I own al...

In She: A History of Adventure , by H. Rider Haggard, Horace Holly, an Oxford scholar, is entrusted with the guardianship of a five-year-old...

Some months ago, I needed to buy a sympathy card, so I stepped into a nearby drugstore, where they had an entire aisle of cards for all occa...

I've long been wanting a blog and mulling over concepts for it. A personal blog was out. I’ve seen personal blogs about nothing much don...