Good news for all the Caroline Stevermer fans out there! A sequel to Sorcery and Cecelia is finally being released after all these years, again co-authored with Patricia Wrede! (And I know there are a few Stevermer fans who read this journal, and might well be more by the time you’ve finished reading this entry. If you enjoy Jane Austen and Martha Wells, you’ll enjoy these, too. When the first book was released, it was described as “Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer have J.R.R. Tolkien to tea–or chocolate,” and “a Regency Romance, with magic.” If you’ve read Patricia Wrede’s Magician’s Ward or Mairelon the Magician, these are set in the same world).

The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality

Kate and Cecy and their new husbands, Thomas and James, are off on a Grand Tour. Their plans? To leisurely travel about the Continent, take in a few antiquities, and–of course–purchase fabulous Parisian wardrobes.

But once they arrive in France, mysterious things start to happen. Cecy receives a package containing a lost coronation treasure, Thomas’s valet is assaulted, and Kate loses a glove. Soon it becomes clear that they have stumbled upon a dastardly, magical plot to take over Europe.

Now the four newlyweds must embark on a daring chase to thwart the evil conspiracy. And there’s no telling the trouble they’ll get into along the way. For when you mix Kate and Cecy and magic, you never know what’s going to happen next!

Cecy and Kate, loose on the Continent with their new spouses? One knows perky, sardonic banter and catatrophe simply must occur. It’s being released in hardcover this September; I know I’ll be reading it. I might even buy the first book in hardcover to match it. (I often graduate my favourite books to hardcover, and my mass-market paperback is pretty tattered, being originally second-hand, passed around several hands, sold by a borrower without my knowledge, and being re-discovered in another second-hand shop with my name still inside.) The title of the first book has been expanded to Sorcery and Cecelia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country, another delightful description.

There’s a co-author web page called, appropriately enough, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. It says The Grand Tour will be available in December, but it’s a bit out of date.