Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

You guys I cannot even tell you how much I loved this book.  DANG, is my active response.  False:  My real response to it as I have been lounging about all morning finishing it has been to giggle (yes GIGGLE) uncontrollably and with unbridled glee.  No hyperbole, serious.  I'm trying to think of when I have been so charmingly delighted with a novel, and I am having a hard time.  

I hate to say too much about actual plot, because it's so much fun to have it all unfold, so instead I'll just explain the basic premise, which really is that the two authoresses started out just playing a game with each other where you write letters back and forth in character.  There's a really nice blurb in the back of the book where they explain, but basically one of them just invented a character and a setting (post-Napoleonic Wars England in a slightly alternate reality in which magic happens!) and wrote a letter to her "cousin." The other woman writes back as the cousin character, and soon they developed this whole wonderful plot full of wonderful good times!  

Seriously, this is the kind of book that almost makes me mad at everyone in the world who has ever read it, because WHY DID THEY NOT TELL ME SOONER?  I mean this thing was published in 1988--I could have been enjoying it for practically my entire life!  But I suppose really I just ought to be grateful that someone finally did, or the rest of my life would be much sadder.  The truly joyful thing is that there are two more books in the series--and the even greater thing about that is that it's just a happy bonus, because the first one absolutely stands alone (the second wasn't published til 2003!); none of this shiz where the first one ends practically mid-sentence, unlike SOME books I have just reviewed* which feature glittery torsos all over the dang place...

*Did anyone else think it was kind of ridiculous to say "reviewed" just then, because um I do not think verbalized giggling or glittery torso hating counts as "reviewing," and let's be honest, that is pretty much all I do up in here.