Only a Novel–3 Days, 3 Quotes Challenge: Day 2

In case you haven’t seen yesterday’s post, I’ve been nominated by Wandering Words to participate in the 3 Days, 3 Quotes Challenge. Today is Day 2!

Without further ado, here is my second quote—one of my favorite passages from Jane Austen’s Gothic parody, Northanger Abbey:

 “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

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Darker Still Review–A Modern Gaslamp Fantasy

Darker Still coverLove classic Gothic novels, but prefer protagonists with a little more spunk than the defenseless damsels typically featured in these works? Then the books of Leanna Renee Hieber may be just what you’re looking for. In Darker Still, the first in her Magic Most Foul series, Hieber follows the tropes of her Gothic predecessors, writing in an epistolary style and featuring murder, mystery, and the occult set in a romanticized past. The story takes place, however, in a museum in 19th-century New York, rather than in the stereotypical Old World gothic manor.

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