Deal or Duel: An Alexander Hamilton Card Game

Deal or Duel: An Alexander Hamilton Card Game by Clarkson Potter. 2017 Recommended for older children, teens, and adults.




If you have older children or teach teens who love all things Alexander Hamilton, try this boxed card game. A large folded game board provides structure and places to put the "Debtors' Prison", card piles for action and discards, and money, "The Treasury", Around the edges are footsteps to pace the "Dueling Ground" as skirmishes happen.. A separate page identifies the personalities of the times; they are multicultural and diverse in careers.. You can win like a Democratic-Republican or a Federalist so players really learn a great deal about the people and the Constitution while playing. It takes awhile to get the rules right in your head, but perseverance pays for dedicated players!  The small box easily fits into a beach bag and parts are well constructed. I received this from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.

Tangerine: A Novel by Christine Mangan

Tangerine: A Novel by Christine Mangan. ECC, an imprint of HarperCollins, 2018.
Adult fiction. Reviewed advanced readers' copy from American Library Association conference in Chicago, June, 2017.  Cover not finalized.

It's the 1950's. Alice Shipley left Bennington College after a mysterious incident. She has married and moved to Tangier with her new husband. Then her college roommate, Lucy Mason, arrives. Lucy is confident where Alice is shy. Lucy has a murky past while Alice has shared every detail of her wealthy upbringing with Lucy.  Lucy was always the one who made plans, took chances, and ventured fearlessly into the world. Now, Alice is back into the old patterns of following Lucy's lead. Last time, things didn't end so well. Has anything changed?


Mangan does a good job of making each woman a distinct personality. The setting is really a character as the heat and foreign streets and markets come alive in the detailed descriptions. Putting the book in the 1950's reinforces the few options available to women at the time. Readers may think the book is going one direction, but things change and keep readers on their toes...and on the edge of their seats!

House of Shadows by Nicola Cornick

 House of Shadows by Nicola Cornick. Graydon House, 2015. Adult fiction.


Part mystery, part romance, part historical fiction, House of Shadows combines them all! When modern-day Holly Ansell's brother disappears near the mill they knew as children, she returns to her roots to try and find him. The English countryside is home to gardens and forests where Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, spent her last years. Legends abound about a famous pearl and a diamond encrusted mirror that Elizabeth thought could see the future and bring disaster. In the early 1801's a woman named Lavinia Flyte wrote a diary that involves past, present, and future.


Cornick is a historian and docent for a seventeenth century house in Oxfordshire. Her research pays off as she describes details of Ashdown House quite realistically. She writes smoothly and makes it easy to keep the threads of the different stories from tangling.