The Weight of Amber

 

 The Weight of Amber (The Thornfield Inheritance #1)  by Eleanor Vane. Cloud City Press LLC, 2026. 339 pages. ***** May 1, 2026 publication date

From Amazon...

"Ailis Thornfield has a gift she cannot afford to name: when she touches an object, she feels its history. A wedding ring grows heavy with decades of love. A knife burns with the memory of blood. She has survived as an herbalist in the Scottish borderlands by hiding what she can do behind knowledge that looks like intuition and cures that look like luck. Her mother was not so careful." Her mother burned as a witch.  The English Crown sends a magistrate to investigate. James Blackwood is young, educated, and inconveniently principled. He has been sent to find evidence of ungodly practices."

I received an ARC to review and I am so glad that I accepted. Part historical fiction and part romance, it has all of the elements to keep you spellbound. Ailis' gift is a blessing and a curse. She's learned to keep quiet about her ability and to ascribe a "normal" reason for her knowledge. I felt her fear and sadness after her mother's death. Descriptions of the living conditions of the prisoners and the way in which the women were dragged out of their homes reinforced the horror. "To protest was to be named. To be named was to be next." Vane has transported us to Scotland in 1593 and begged the question, what would you do? I recommend this novel and look forward to the second one in the series. 

Eleanor Vane holds an MA in Early Modern European History and spent years working in museum archives before turning to fiction. Her debut series, The Thornfield Inheritance, spans five centuries and three continents. For more information, click here. 

Don't wait, preorder now (publication date May 1) from Amazon. 

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Peace Mini Raffle Quilt

 

@Cherrywood Fabrics

In this crazy world on the news every night, I became obsessed with the Monks walking for Peace from Texas to DC. https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace/.

My Quilt Guild is having a Quilt Show and has asked for Mini Raffle Quilts to auction so I decided to combine my fascination with creating a mini that others' may like to purchase tickets to win.

Cherrywood jumped on the bandwagon and offered a fat quarter bundle in the color way of the monk's garments.

The colors are gorgeous! 

 

I love that the colors are labeled with with the name and number.

Disappearing nine patch is a simple and effective pattern.

Wanting it to look random isn't as easy as I thought because I had 8 individual fabrics instead of 9.

Deciding on font and size is always a challenge. 

Lighting really does make a difference when photographing a picture. Finished size is 18x 18. 

I decided to face it instead of a binding. Not a pretty back, however, I like the look for the front of the wall hanging. 

Tickets for raffle quilts will be available at the Brandywine Valley Quilters Show- May 29 - 31, 2026 

#walkforpeace #BVQminirafflequilt #peacequilt

 

Our Missing Hearts

 

 

 Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. New York:Penguin Press, 2022. 335 pages. *****

Chosen as the One Book, One Philadelphia for 2026!

https://www.phillyvoice.com/one-book-one-philadelphia-2026-our-missing-hearts/ 

https://billypenn.com/2026/02/26/one-book-one-philly-2026-celeste-ng-our-missing-hearts/

Published in 2022, Ng's story bears a striking resemblance to what's happening today. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives with his father, a former Linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His father's job provides housing, so he and Bird live in a university dormitory. Bird misses his mother and questions where she is and knows better than to ask anyone, his father has cautioned him about drawing attention to himself. Living under The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT) PACT keeps American citizens safe from foreign influences and allows children to be removed from parents who are unfit or unpatriotic. Bird's mother leaves them to protect them from government interference since she is a poet of Asian descent who participates in the resistance and is considered a traitor. Bird is determined to find her after trying to connect through books she read him and by reading her poetry. He's not surprised but disappointed when visiting the library, he discovers that her books have been removed. Bird begins his journey by following the clues he thinks his mother has left him like breadcrumbs to lead the way.

Ng has a style of writing that engages and empowers the reader. The author drew inspiration from real life events and things that she thought might become reality. That in and of itself is chilling, the events that Bird's family experiences are happening today and her insight into the fear felt by the parents and the children who are removed and sometimes never to be found again.  Some of the reviews are critical and it is an uncomfortable book to read. A reminder of Fred Rogers’ famous quote about finding hope during difficult times is: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping'". This is a novel of hope and love even when society seems judgmental and hopeless. This is a thought-provoking novel and a great discussion one for Book Clubs. I will be thinking about it and recommending it for a long time, no surprise as to why Philadelphia chose it for 2026. 

Celeste Ng  is an American writer and novelist. Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan).  Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. For more information - https://www.celesteng.com

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