For as long as I can remember I have loved to read and be surrounded by books. And so working at a publishing house is the perfect job for me. I get to read fabulous books by some of my favorite authors including Dean Koontz, Linwood Barclay and Karin Slaughter to name but a few. I also get to read books that don’t normally fall into my favorite category of mystery/thriller and am occasionally surprised by the results.

Case in point. I will sheepishly start off by saying that Loving Frank by Nancy Horan was a book that I thought I wouldn’t like. Historical fiction is not my usual cup of tea. And so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself over 80 pages into the book before I even came up for air.

The story tells the tale of Frank Lloyd Wright and the affair he has with a married woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. For a first novel, Horan picks and ambitious subject yet manages to blend fact and fiction together beautifully. This is a fast paced narrative, with interesting characters and intriguing plot.

More than a love story, it is a snapshot of early 20th century misogyny and power of living your dream. The voice of Mamah is powerful and yet her struggle to balance her wants with what society (and her family) deems as proper is so moving. The end of this book made me cry and it’s a story that will stay with me forever.

Rosie Little is not your average contemporary fairy tale heroine: Her eagle-eyes spy the wolf in grandmother’s clothing and her sixteen-hole cherry red Doc Martens will make more of a fashion statement than Cinderella’s glass slippers any day.

In Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, Danielle Wood has turned the fairy tale on its head and presented to us a collection of sassy, sharp and hilariously funny stories. The note at the opening of the book states that “these are tales for girls who have boots as stout as their hearts, and who are prepared to lace them up (boots and hearts both) and step out into the wilds in search of what they desire.” Cue a flashback to the eight-hole cherry red Doc Martens I wore as a teen — sixteen holes would have been too much for my mother to handle — and I was immediately sold.

Have you ever had one of those moments while reading when you are overcome by a déjà vu and can’t separate the book from something you are certain has happened to you before? Or when you find yourself falling so deeply into the author’s observations and descriptions that you realize how frightfully — and sometimes embarrassingly — accurate she is? I had more than one of those moments while reading this incredibly assured collection of tales.

And Rosie? She’s fierce and sometimes a menace, that’s for sure, but her compassion is undeniable. Rosie’s experiences serve as good reminders for hard lessons you have already learned and will make you grateful for the ones you have managed to avoid so far. She’s the friend you have who is always the life of the party, but who doubles as a voice of wisdom and acute listener, too. I know more than one real-life Rosie.

Though I have yet to know a woman whose love turned her into a mannequin or to be turned into one myself, as I read these Cautionary Tales I laughed out loud, felt my hair stand on end, and called friends to relive embarrassingly similar moments. These charming 275 pages make for a thoroughly entertaining walk through the woods to grandmother’s house on a summer afternoon, handsome woodcutters and all.

I asked my Mom about those cherry red Docs the other day. She thinks they are stored in a box somewhere, along with my three-hole black ones that Rosie would never have approved of… Maybe it’s time to dig those old red boots out and dust them off.