Lauren, Christina. Twice in a Blue Moon.

NY: Gallery Books, 2019.

“Christina Lauren” (which is actually a two-woman writing team) has become a very dependable source of highly original romantic novels. And I avoided the term “rom-com” because they’re often much more serious than they are “comic.” The protagonist this time is Tate Jones, just turned eighteen as the story opens, and a resident of a tiny town on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California, but she’s in London for two weeks with her grandmother, Jude, to celebrate graduating high school. And the two women have only been there a day when they run into another pair of Americans in a pub — Sam Brandis, who is tall and broad and twenty-one and very good looking (and white), and his grandfather, Luther, who is expansive and friendly and outgoing (and black), and the four of them quickly form a London sightseeing team. Moreover, Tate and Sam take to spending most of their nights lying on the grass in the Marriott’s back garden and talking about everything for hours. Sam’s a country boy who loves to write stories. Tate doesn’t really know what she’s going to do but she’s in love with everything about Hollywood.

Macgregor, Joanne. The Law of Tall Girls.

np: Amazon Digital Services, 2017.

I have a 15-year-old granddaughter who has been a book junky — and a quite sophisticated one — since before she could read for herself. Now, I read a fair number of straight-to-Kindle books — and the average quality is higher than you might think — but I don’t ordinarily review them. The same is true of YA novels: I review only a small number of those I actually read. This highly engaging teenage love story, however, is an exception in both ways.

Atkinson, Kate. Started Early, Took My Dog.

NY: Little, Brown, 2011.

The “narrative strategy” is the overall design or plan a novelist adopts to facilitate the telling of the story. It has to be coherent and it has to be deliberately chosen and consistently adhered to or the book just doesn’t work. Atkinson’s strategy this time is to introduce a number of characters who, at the beginning of the story, don’t know of each other’s existence (or don’t realize they know), but all of whom are involved in some way, past or present, with the key facts and events. As in her previous books, a sort of carefully crafted randomness.

Baker, Kage. The House of the Stag.

NY: Tor, 2008.

This is the second volume of the fantasy trilogy that began with The Anvil of the World, and it’s a far better book. It’s also not a sequel but a sort of prequel, and you still must have read the first book or you’ll miss the import of nine-tenths of what’s going on in this one. Every world, real or fictional, includes “furniture” — the history, cultural evolution, mythology, and religion that provide the background to present-day life.

Fraser, George MacDonald. The Hollywood History of the World, from One Million B.C. to Apocalypse Now.

NY: Morrow, 1988.

Any book which undertakes to argue the author’s choice of the best or worst of anything has a good shot at being a lot of fun — and an even better shot when the author is a very knowledgeable, highly opinionated, and notably talented wordsmith. Fraser is best known for his “Flashman” comic-historical novels — highly regarded for their detailed accuracy — but he was also an experienced and professional playwright and screenplay writer. And in this volume he considers how history has been treated in the (mostly) English-language films of Hollywood and Britain.