My stats:

Hours spent reading, listening to audiobook, writing up books finished, and Challenge interactions: 32 hours, 15 minutes. (Rounded, and oddly, same as last year.)

Books read: 7 (I of those I'd started before the Challenge), and a few hours of an audiobook listened to.

Money donated to Reading is Fundamental: $75

Books still to write up: 1 (Greg Van Eekhout's The Boy at the End of the World.)

Reduction in my Goodreads To-read shelf: hahaha. (It's gone down a few, but nothing like as much as it'll go up after a few more minutes looking at other participants' reading.)

Resolution for next year: get better sleep the night *before* the Challenge so I don't go into it tired.

Other probably unkeepable resolution for next year: don't discover that the living room radiator is leaking the day Challenge starts. Just don't. I had no time to make the nice scones I was planning to make, and fun snacks would have been really comforting.

Aahhh, it's a good sign that thinking about next year is already fun.

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I'm SO not putting the cover here, as it's vile. Actually, I'm not going to say all that much about this book anyway, as it's book 3 of a trilogy, and it's all spoilers for book 1. So the few random thoughts that are all I'm capable of, for the trilogy.

1. This isn't exactly the kind of fantasy that would appeal to the readers who like their fantasy with a good basis that borders on the realistic end of the fantastic. Even in the first book, there was a big old unanswerable question lurking: How did anybody KNOW about the Shift? (For everyone who hasn't read it, all children born after the Shift - some unknown event that happened 16 years before book 1 - can see ghosts, while those who were born before it, cannot. Even those who could see them before the Shift lost the ability.) How did the adults find out all they did about kids being able to see ghosts, and, even more so, how did they discover how to trap and control them?

2. But that said, the Shift caused a really interesting change in the power relationships between adults and teens, with the teens having to translate for the adults so they can communicate with ghosts, as for example, in trials. (Nice side-effect of the Shift is the ability of murder victims to testify!)  In book 3 there's a lot of seriously bad stuff going on with the DNP (govt agency to control ghosts) and the big business interests that make fortunes over the control of ghosts, and it leads to the proposal of  a draft for all post-Shifters. A draft as in the erstwhile military draft - all post-Shifters will be forced to register on their 18th birthday and serve in the DNP.  We're not talking light-handedness here, but still, it's unusual and I like the 'what-if' exploration. (And I thought the scene in the high-school with the students standing up for the principal was pretty great.)

3. Ridiculous romance, we get it. And while there's the inevitable YA love-triangle, the fact that one of the guys is ghost Logan does offer interesting possibilities for looking at loss and letting go. I didn't even like Logan at all, but still found Aura's prolonged struggle to be loyal to him while finding a way to help them both move on quite touching. And in book 3, there's a ludicrous young lovers *fated* to be together and being connected in a way no other young lovers are deal - which isn't actually all that ludicrous because it's true in the reality of the book.

4. Bit of a downturn when Aura and Zach come to Ireland, to go to Newgrange where it all began, but it's mostly fairly little stuff, and the actual winter solstice at Newgrange is kind of awesome. It did grate that they kept talking about Irish people speaking 'Gaelic', and was very unlikely that Zachery would have been so easily able to understand said Irish speakers. But I was willing to let the daft Irish [spoiler] group go as this wasn't, as I said, very realist fantasy. Well, mostly willing to let it go.

5. Overall, despite the above-mentioned & other occasional annoyances (Aura makes some really bad choices in book 2 when grieving, and throws a hell of a bratty temper tantrum in book 3), the series was fun and I'm kind of sorry it's over now.

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I am really running out of steam. Not reading steam, but sitting at the computer and saying anything about the reading steam. Though this wasn't an easy read, either. Somehow or other I'd got the impression that this was historical fantasy, and once I got over that, I still had the idea it was more -- lighthearted. Not fluff, but not quite the tragic, bloody, slice of history I should have known it would be. Caernarfon, Wales, 1293, that setting.

The book is told in alternating POVs, with the vast majority of the narrative going to Cecily, especially at the beginning of the book. There's a quote on the front cover from Karen Cushman, and in the beginning Cecily's voice sounded *very* like Birdy, which is always a good thing, although that set it up for being a less tragic story. (Also, Coats doesn't have the sure touch with maintaining "period language" that Cushman has. It's not usually too bad, but there are definite missteps.) But it soon becomes clear just how different from Birdy Cecily is. She's presented as a spoiled brat, and in fact  the other POV character, Gwenhwyfar, calls her "the Brat", but in ways she's worse than that, and so willing to cause others to suffer that it makes for chilling reading.  Of course she's not going to have been taught that injustice matters even when it's not just to you or yours, because her father doesn't think that way. And in all honesty, it's probably a very small number of English people at the time who would have been likely to think outside the "the King conquered Wales - it's ours now" mindset when told Welch holdings were theirs for the asking. (Pretty much.)  I didn't get just why the father thought he SHOULD have had the estate he ran for his crusading brother - he was the younger, and would there even have been the ability to bring a suit to try to get it for himself? I'd have thought it extremely unlikely, but then my 13th century English legal knowledge isn't that solid.

Gwenhwyfar's narrative is also difficult, as her reasons for burning resentment and hatred against the English has so much to feed it. Her father was killed in an earlier uprising, leaving her and her younger brother to take care of their mother and themselves, in a town that the English are running in a deeply corrupt manner. She has reason to hate Cecily from the start, as Cecily tries to have her thrown out of her position on the first day, but just as she starts to believe Cecily might be learning a bit (which she is), Cecily behaves even more unforgivably. (It's bad, too, for all Cecily isn't quite aware just how horrifically it could end. I mean, she *should* have been aware of it, even though she chose not to see.)

Those of you whose history is less pathetic than mine will have known that there was an uprising coming, and it's then that the book takes a turn I didn't expect. It's not as simplistic as showing the Welsh to be capable of brutality in the killing of people in the town when they rebel - though it shows this, also. But it's how Gwenhwyfar and her brother react when Cecily is utterly at their mercy that is surprising, and works towards an unexpected and satisfying ending, though one that leaves nothing sure.  There was a fine author's note at the end that told about what happened after the uprising - and it was what she'd put into some of the characters' mouths. I do like a good author's note after a good historical novel! 

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I'll come back to book 4 (Greg Van Eekhout's The Boy at the End of the World) soon, honestly - was just too tired last night when I finished to sit at the computer and say anything sensible. It was a keeper though!

  Picture the Dead's (very brief) Goodreads synopsis:

Jennie Lovell's life is the very picture of love and loss. First she is orphaned and forced to live at the mercy of her stingy, indifferent relatives. Then her fiancé falls on the battlefield, leaving her heartbroken and alone. Jennie struggles to pick up the pieces of her shattered life, but is haunted by a mysterious figure that refuses to let her bury the past.






All right, but it neglects to mention that her twin brother has also died (it's the Civil War), and that her fiancé was one of those 'indifferent relatives', and her first cousin. My feelings about this book are mostly that it's very stylishly done - I love the way it's presented, with pages of letters and photographs as if from Jennie's scrapbook - but there isn't terribly much depth. Honestly though, I might have had more time for the story if I hadn't been so annoyed by the stupid, utterly pointless fat-bashing. Jennie's mean and hypocritical aunt is described on page 2 as "a spoiled child, blown up into a monster", and that "blown up" is quickly clarified as meaning fat: same page, her chin "wobbles like aspic". First picture of her, she's fat (shocker) and ugly (ditto). Next but one scene, we have "Her eyes were baleful, her pudgy finger crooked".  They get a photograph taken and Jennie says her aunt's "jellied bulk affords her a dignity that eludes her in real life". There are plenty more "fat fingers", "squeezing" of her girth -- all the usual.

But, there's an odd one later on, about two girls who had been Jennie's "friends", when she was engaged to the older son of the family. Their calling cards are pasted onto a page in Jennie's scrapbook, with her writing beside it: "If everyone knew how much Flora gossips and Rosemary eats, they mightn't be so quick to accept a calling card from either sister."  Really?  These snobs who drop Jennie as soon as she's lost social standing are a huge cliché, and part of that cliché is really the gossiping involved in social calls. But this toss-off, illogical remark is still pretty vicious - Flora's gossiping is a real fault, for all it wouldn't have stopped her visiting with her social set, but eating a lot? 

It's a pity that there was this kind of rubbish going on, as the details about the early days of photography are a lot of fun, and seem to have been well researched. Other things were more dubious historically, though I can only say of one of them - "At 18?  No." as it's a spoiler.

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Well, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the thought of writing anything coherent about this one, so have a Goodreads synopsis:
Sixteen-year-old Scotch struggles to fit in—at home she's the perfect daughter, at school she's provocatively sassy, and thanks to her mixed heritage, she doesn’t feel she belongs with the Caribbeans, whites, or blacks. And even more troubling, lately her skin is becoming covered in a sticky black substance that can't be removed. While trying to cope with this creepiness, she goes out with her brother—and he disappears. A mysterious bubble of light just swallows him up, and Scotch has no idea how to find him. Soon, the Chaos that has claimed her brother affects the city at large, until it seems like everyone is turning into crazy creatures. Scotch needs to get to the bottom of this supernatural situation ASAP before the Chaos consumes everything she's ever known—and she knows that the black shadowy entity that's begun trailing her every move is probably not going to help.

A blend of fantasy and Caribbean folklore, at its heart this tale is about identity and self acceptance—because only by acknowledging her imperfections can Scotch hope to save her brother.

Actually, that's kind of helpful because I don't think it's great as descriptions go, though it's easier to criticize than to write one myself. Starting from the top, Scotch (also known as Sojourner, which is such a wonderful name) is hardly the perfect daughter; she may hide things like the clothes she *really* wears at school, and she may have hidden the fact that she was going out with a white guy, but that's not quite 'perfect'. Provocatively sassy is an odd one, but I think the third is just a bit off: I'd read this description, and read Hopkinson discussing it, and expected Scotch to feel more obviously as if she didn't belong. In the book, she gets grief about not looking like her darker brother, but she's very able to deal with it. And she simply doesn't *take* the grief about her Jamaican accent not being right or the like (from some of the kids at school).

Anyway, the Chaos is the name given to all the weird stuff that happens, both in Toronto and around the world. And it's seriously weird, which in a way is all I feel like saying about it - it's Seriously. Weird. If you don't like random surreal things happening for no reason, this is probably not the book for you. I really liked it, but I'm not at all sure that I'd be able to justify it if I were writing a real review of the book. It's a bit too random and there's a bit of heavy metaphorical layer to the randomness that I'm not sure totally works. But this isn't a real review - hurrah!

Anyway, the Chaos is now dealt with! And there's a really interesting YA story there too, though it's not at all as simple as "Teen of Mixed Racial Identity Comes to Terms with her Identity". But the thing about that YA story is that Scotch is a real jerk at times, and her repeated "Oh no, she didn't!" moments got to be a bit annoying. The first one is quite neat though. She's just dealt with a guy in a bar (her brother snuck her in so she could hear him perform his poetry) who's being all flirty until he sees her brother. When Scotch tells the guy it's her brother rather than her boyfriend, he says ALL the awful things about how they can't be related, really, and then goes on to say the most hideously awful thing about how she could even 'pass as white'. She's duly disgusted, but tells him off with (alas, probably practiced) ease. And shortly after, she's talking to a girl, Punum, who's just pe

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  And today I seem to have no border around the image....  Still ruling the tech!

  Goodreads synopsis: Thirteen-year-old Aluna has lived her entire life under the ocean with the Coral  Kampii in the City of Shifting Tides. But after centuries spent hidden from the Above World, her colony’s survival is in doubt. The Kampii’s breathing necklaces are failing, but the elders are unwilling to venture above water to seek answers. Only headstrong Aluna and her friend Hoku are stubborn and bold enough to face the terrors of land to search for way to save their people.

But can Aluna’s warrior spirit and Hoku’s tech-savvy keep them safe? Set in a world where overcrowding has led humans to adapt—growing tails to live under the ocean or wings to live on mountains—here is a ride through a future where greed and cruelty have gone unchecked, but the loyalty of friends remains true.


I had a bit of trepidation starting this one, partly because it sounded a bit more "Under the seaaaa" (you all know the tune, right?) than I thought I was in the mood for, fun as that song is, and partly because it's middle grade instead of my usual YA. But neither of those proved to be problems once I was just a short way in, and even if Aluna hadn't left her ocean home (the clue *was* in the title) very quickly, it would have been fine.

Or more accurately, if Aluna hadn't headed for land, followed quickly by Hoku. One of the nicest things about the book is the journey companions, and the way these two friends pick up new ones along the way. Hoku and Aluna are the classic polar opposite types of friends, with Aluna being the one who wants to be a warrior (but isn't allowed to be, though at least she can train because of her brothers' willingness to teach her), and Hoku utterly uninterested in fighting, but fascinated by technology. It's nice that there isn't just this fairly standard twist in the grrrl being feisty and keen on fighting though, as the next companion to be added is Calli, an Aviar (I'll get to the 'splinters' soon), who's just as mechanically minded and smart as Hoku. And with whom Hoku is immediately smitten, in a really sweet and funny portrayal of first love. Hoku's internal musings on kissing were delightful.  Dash, who eventually joins the group, is - or should have been - an Equian word-weaver. And there's the utterly adoptable Zorro, a -- well, a very special raccoon, not to spoil anything.

The world is complicated and fascinating. As earth became over-populated and life there unsustainable, big corporations (including HydraTek) invented bio-engineering abilities to allow humans to exist under the sea, as with the Kampii and Deepfell; in the air high above earth; in the desert; and elsewhere.  The Kampii refer to the Ancients, who gave them thick skin and strong bones to allow them to survive underwater, but also breathing shells, which attach to the necks and allow them to draw oxygen from the water. But the breathing shells need power to function, unlike their other adaptations, and the Kampii don't have the technological abilities to generate that power in sufficient quantities, when the breathing shells start to fail.

I thought this was all wonderful, and was quite happy to leave the details of the science aside for the most part - I'm happy to see the book as just as hybrid as the splinters, rather than being categorised as simply straight science fiction or fantasy. I did have some quibbles occasionally, however. One was about the group of Aviars Hoku and Aluna encounter and come to be allied with, Skyfeather's Landing. This group is all female, and though there

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Nice start!  Am wasting valuable reading time trying to figure out size adjustment and image deletion and various other stupid things I've forgotten, so the cover can be seen (I like it), without taking up everyone's friends' pages.

Anyway, this one probably isn't going to be well known outside Ireland/the UK, so I'll pop in the blurb from Goodreads:

Jacki King is fifteen and adjusting to her new life in a small village. She's missing Dublin but she's making new friends: artistic Colin, feisty Emily - and Nick, gorgeous yet unavailable. But no sooner is Jacki settled than the torturous headaches and nightmares begin - followed by strange visions, voices and signs...Jacki refuses to believe that something paranormal is happening. But then she discovers the unsolved murder that occurred in the village years before...

Actually, I've just spotted something on pasting that in, though it's something that will only mean anything to a small number of readers (especially ones, like me, considerably older than the book's target readers): the tone of the book reminds me quite a bit of the stories in Jackie magazine and its like. It's very girly.  Nick is gorgeous, and within one very brief and highly embarrassing meeting, Jacki is pulling petals off a flower and thinking about first love. After a second, where he's with his girlfriend (who's also gorgeous but fake, so it's okay!) , she's writing love songs about him, pretty much, and so it goes.

While this is very off-putting, there's quite a bit of good stuff in here along with the fluff. The author has a nice ear for dialogue, and the village (not a real one) is fun to read about - this isn't the kid of cod-Irish we get so fed up with seeing in books and on film/TV, and it's not played for the cheap laughs either.

The other thing I liked is that Cassidy bucks the usual trend of this type of story, in having the local GP recognise from the one office visit that something supernatural is actually going on, and send Jacki straight off to a local healer. Jacki does drag her heels a bit before giving in and going to see him, but it's rather a nice twist on the 'nobody will believe meeeee' theme. (Though that can be effective too, of course.) The characters' behaviour does occasionally seem more than a bit unlikely, and the murder is pretty obvious.  But, despite the weaknesses, it kept me entertained enough, and I'm happy to try the next book, which is set up in the short framing sequences with Jacki being asked to participate in solving the murders of four girls.

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Looks in confusion at wooly cardigan and socks.

But it is June, and it is Mother Reader's  annual 48 Hour Book Challenge !

I'm trying to eat, and reply to comments, and gather my books all at once, which is going about as well as can be imagined.  I'll be donating $2 per hour read to Reading is Fundamental.

Will also be tweeting this, and trying to put my write-ups on Goodreads too.  What could possibly go wrong??

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Have been to Massachusetts east and west, and met internet friends older and newer, and it was fantastic.  Did not manage to read LJ/DW at all while away, and probably won't catch up now, so any ignoring of newses is completely unintentional.

This is definitely the fast and dirty way to do this, but I will attempt to clean up later: I need to know how friends who have helped in any way with The History Book would like to be acknowledged. There'll be a section in the acknowledgement for those on LJ who helped with suggestions of texts for us to look at, discussion about those we were already looking at, etc.  steepholm and I will go back through our posts and make a list of everyone who did so, and write asking about name preference, but that might not happen until after the book has been sent off.  If you want your username rather than your "real name", let me know in comment or PM.  Er, if I know your real name, of course, otherwise default will obviously be username. 


*(Just the ramblings of a Fire and Hemlock fanatic.)

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It's been a frantic few days, and haven't managed to keep up with friends' posts at all, but it's for a good reason, for once: I'm on my way to the States! (Yes, as I write, but only on the coach to Dublin Airport for now.) haven't been back since 2004 and haven't crossed the Atlantic by myself since before I was married. Will be seeing friends I haven't seen for far too long, and some I've never seen outside a computer screen, and relatives as well.

I have wonderful beta reading with me, and a C.J. Cherryh packed in my bag, along with my new 3 Euro reading glasses so I have a hope of being able to read it.

And last night, when I went down to our beloved local health food store to get tofu for dinner, I mentioned that I was going away the next day. Oliver (one of the family owners who lived in San Francisco for some years) asked me where I was going. I told him it would be around Massachusetts and he asked if I might be going into a certain health food store of some repute. I had already planned to, and he asked me if I could check out the deli section for him! And get menus! And maybe take pictures! And if the one in Cambridge was especially nice, to let him know, because he "wouldn't mind visiting it" himself!

My mission, should I choose to accept it....

Catch y'all on the flip side! (Assuming the plane isn't washed right out of the sky by the miserable windy rain we're having now.) [Insert other generic jinx-avoiding utterances here]

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

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Those of you who live in relative proximity to Ireland may have heard that we had flooding here yesterday, especially in Dublin.  Serious flooding.  Real, no messing, don't travel if you don't have to, cars abandoned, scary flooding.  When Younger Daughter left the house to go to Trinity yesterday morning, it was all set to be a rainy day.  She left prepared for said rainy day.  But later in the afternoon I heard that the trains were suspended past Dun Laoghaire, some 3 to 4 miles between us and the city centre, so I texted her and told her.  Suspension of services like these aren't that infrequent and are usually fixed fairly soon, so she decided to stay in town, have dinner, and wait for the promised end of the rain.  And sure enough, by the time she'd finished dinner the Irish Rail website was saying the trains were running again, with some delays, and she got on a train with rejoicing.  (Though drenched, as the rain hadn't even slowed at all.) But then the train stopped after just two stations and there was an inaudible announcement, so I checked the website again, couldn't see what was wrong, and saw the train before hers had made it all the way to our station.  They started again, three more stations and they stopped, telling everyone there was something like 3 feet of water on the line ahead so no point waiting. When she phoned me to tell me this, she was shaking with cold, so badly I could hear her teeth chattering.

I tried ringing a couple of taxi companies, to see if anyone could get a taxi there, but was told there wasn't a hope, because of bad flooding just near the station where she was stranded.  No trains, no taxis, presumably no buses, so I got into my car.  My plan was to see if I could find a taxi at a rank nearby, park and get the taxi to go as close to Booterstown as possible, which I communicated with Y.D. as I set off.  I knew some likely trouble spots on the roads from previous floodings, but was stunned at how bad it was even around home, with sand bags at the bottom of a road right in the main part of Dalkey, torrential rain still pouring down and half of the roads badly flooded.  No taxis, of course, so I told Y.D. to start walking along the main road and I'd drive towards her and if she saw a bus to hop on it and I'd meet her wherever.  A few roads I hadn't expected to be bad were closed, but I got through okay until I was nearly in Blackrock, where there was a shopping centre where whichever one of us got there first could wait safely.  And then just a bit farther and I saw the road was completely impassible, and hadn't been closed off yet, and Y.D. was the other side of this massive flooded area.  The woman in the car stopped in front of me came over and said there seemed to be nothing to do but drive over the road divider to turn around,  unless they could clear the road behind us,  but then she didn't seem able to get up on the divider, with a few tries.  At which point a construction worker came walking towards us, talked to her and came over to me, and said "You're not getting through THAT", which I well knew.  I asked about the woman in the car in front of me and he said "She's afraid of the car being mumble mumble" and walked off into the night. 

Eventually she got over and turned around and I rammed my car at the divider with more desperation than wisdom, perhaps, but got over it.  I pulled in as soon as I could, around the corner from the flooded area, and phoned Y.D. again.  She'd walked to that part, saw it was totally flooded and then gasped in horror as someone walked into it and went up to their waist in water. I was saying "DO NOT GO IN THAT WATER", and told her where I was and to cut down to Blackrock village if the road was safer there, and she agreed and then her phone cut off. I went in - through ankle deep water - to the house whose driv

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So, I realised the other day that a certain light had gone out of my life, now that I'm not reading ALL THE BOOKS -[just channeling Hyperbole and a Half there, I never read anything like all the books] for our History Book, and enjoying venting spleen in rants that pretty much wrote themselves. So, must stop being lazy and start talking about more of the books I'm just reading, especially when they're books everyone else has read and I want to join in the conversation - or ones I want to get other people to consider reading.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns is pretty firmly in the former category, at least in the YA-reading world. I'd been waiting for it for ages, because of its pre-publication praise by people I trust. Because I'm still pretty lazy, here's the inside jacket description, copy 'n pasted from Goodreads.

Once a century, one person is chosen for greatness.
Elisa is the chosen one.
But she is also the younger of two princesses, the one who has never done anything remarkable. She can’t see how she ever will.
Now, on her sixteenth birthday, she has become the secret wife of a
handsome and worldly king—a king whose country is in turmoil. A king who
needs the chosen one, not a failure of a princess.
And he’s not the only one who needs her. Savage enemies seething
with dark magic are hunting her. A daring, determined revolutionary
thinks she could be his people’s savior. And he looks at her in a way
that no man has ever looked at her before. Soon it is not just her life,
but her very heart that is at stake.
Elisa could be everything to those who need her most. If the
prophecy is fulfilled. If she finds the power deep within herself. If
she doesn’t die young.
Most of the chosen do.

Okay, "not just her life, but her very heart" isn't how I'd have put it, which is actually significant for one of the things I think is pretty cool about the book - Elisa is very definitely concerned about a lot more than her romantic feelings. Another thing I like also seems somewhat misrepresented in the description, and that is that being the chosen one is not so much being chosen "for greatness" as being chosen for service, as Elisa says many times.  When she eventually learns certain things about the chosen ones that have been kept from her, that distinction becomes even clearer, to the point that some chosen ones may die without apparently having had any success at all in life, let alone having achieved "greatness".

Quick little very rough summary of my own, to supplement the book-supplied one. Elisa's feeling that she's a failure is a fairly jumbled consequence of her being fat; being younger sister to a perfect looking and acting princess who (so Elisa thinks) hates Elisa because she (the perfect sister) should have been the chosen one instead of Elisa; she knows lots that you can get from reading books, but nothing much about acting like a ruler; and she's fat.  (I'll be coming back to that one, unsurprisingly.) When she meets this king, who's older than she is, a widower and father and very handsome and is nice to her, she's immediately smitten. They set off back to his country, encounter serious danger on the way, at which point Elisa rises to the occasion admirably, while the King - not so much.  But when they get to his palace, he won't let her tell his people he's married.  Not nice.  Then there's a lot of political stuff (both national and international - the marriage having been to form an alliance against a joint enemy which threatens war) in which Elisa becomes involved and is able to use her smarts to good purpose, until she's kidnapped.  Dragged off on a massively dangerous desert-crossing by a former maid in the castle and her brother, whose situation relates to the political manoeveu

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The other day I happened to see a large sign in a shop window in the city centre advertising ice grips in stock AND that evening found there were thermal socks with a tog rating for sale in our local (small) grocery store.  I'm still pondering the question of whether such early Irish preparations for a winter even worse than the last one are the equivalent of animals growing extra-thick fur and storing more food than normal or conversely represent the Great Irony of -- well, Sod's Law.  If I had to bet large sums of money on it, I'd go for the latter, though I do have to admit that in our hall sit three neatly packaged pairs of ice grips.  (Hold them cheap may who ne'er slipped in Dalkey last winter!)  Moneyless bets taken anytime from now until the first snow.  Or spring.

On the same lines, I was talking to the man who was our landlord for the first two years after we moved to Ireland and found out he was THE person who fell onto the tracks in Dalkey train station last winter during the second or third Big Snow.  (A minor local celebrity, for obvious reasons.) He'd been six months in hospital, and you have to admire the spirit of someone who could say of the experience that he'd made a better recovery than they'd expected, so it was all good.  (Except for the glorious summer he'd heard so many predictions of as he lay in his hospital bed, which didn't happen.)

In more cheerful vein, I've recently been reminded that no matter what life throws at you, Jane Austen never disappoints. I'm sure I've quoted one of my favourite lines from Northanger Abbey before here, but, just to set it up again, here's what Catherine Morland says about "real solemn history", which she cannot be interested in:

"I read it a little as a duty,
but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.
The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences,
in every page; the men all so good for nothing,
and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome:"
Great stuff, but what I realised with some excitement as we were editing a section on alternate histories, is that when Catherine goes on to say:

."..and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull,
for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches
that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts
and designs--the chief of all this must be invention,
and invention is what delights me in other books."

Jane Austen was anticipating the concept of history as narrative by well over a hundred years. And here I'd thought that the famous defence of the novel passage was the best bit of brilliantly cheeky genius to be found in the novel!  Honestly compels me to admit that I'm with Catherine at least in being totally ignorant of real solemn history, and the critical material on history as narrative was all provided by steepholm

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Probably everyone knows what the subject line refers to, but for any who might not, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown posted their experience with an agent who offered to take their co-written YA novel *with* conditions, on Genreville. Many other spec-fic authors came forward telling of similar experiences with manuscripts containing gay characters, and notable figures in the field of "genre" writing (generally speaking, science fiction and fantasy) talked about how underrepresented LGBTQ characters were in the literature.  And then the backlash came, with the agency -- unnamed by Sherwood and Rachel -- denying Sherwood and Rachel's account, and explicitly accusing them of "exploiting" the agent.  I didn't manage to read much of anything online over the last few days, and became aware of the accusations levelled at Sherwood and Rachel only a bit after the fact.  And, to be honest, I was as frustrasted as I was stunned, because I didn't see how I could do anything except make the kind of impassioned "I KNOW them, and they WOULD NOT behave like this" statement which is (rightly) viewed with skepticism by those who don't know the people involved.  The number of communities in which I don't have any kind of clout or respect and in which I'm not known is very large.  I'm not an author, an editor, an academic or a professional, and a couple of retweet (which I've done) may get a few readers, while an LJ post will mostly be read by those who already know Rachel and Sherwood and the situation, plus a few others wandering by, with no reason to pay attention to my impassioned statement.

And then I realised that while I can do nothing about getting more people to see this, I can do more than just say "Here's my personal - relevant - experience with these two authors"; I can say that and add "But you don't have to take my word for it".  (Yup, read that in LeVar Burton's voice, if you ever enjoyed the fabulous PBS Reading Rainbow.)  I can tell you where you can see evidence that backs up my experience.  And having done that, I can - as others have done already - point out a logical problem or two with the accusations being made against Sherwood and Rachel. 

So, I've been reading and loving Sherwood's books since I ordered Crown Duel and read it to my older daughter many years ago.  I found her LJ account (sartorias) a few years after that, and have read her riffs on writing, reading, life, the universe and everything with great appreciation.  The relevant part though, is that I have had the privilege of being a reader for her for some six or seven of her adult novels, starting with The Fox (second in the Inda Quartet).  Remember all those professional credentials I don't have? Right.  So if Sherwood were at all likely to respond to an agent offering to represent her novel by essentially throwing a hissy fit at the suggestion she & Rachel have to make some changes for purposes of tightening up the novel or the like, when a reader with no creds whatsoever suggests changes, there should be heads rolling, right? Of course, Sherwood couldn't have responded more differently.  I never suggested as big a change as losing a character, obviously, but these are relatively big novels for the most part, and there are a lot of emails between us; I can say with

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It's been a while, and I've realised that I'll probably never catch up properly on everyone else's posts, so better to dive back in than stand confusedly on the shore like the little critter in the userpic.  I'm not returning with a proper rant, but flagging an issue that recurred in two articles, a character in a book and someone on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends: food intolerances and their accompanying dietary exclusions.  (All right, I'm ranting a bit.)

One article was on the Rodale website ( I saw it via a Care2 newsletter) and titled "Is Gluten Bad for You?"  The other probably came the same way into my inbox, and is called "What We're (Not) Eating: A Potential Danger of Gluten-Free". The character is in Sarah Dessen's latest, What Happened to Goodbye, a book I liked, if maybe not quite as much as the previous one, Lock and Key.  I'm not sure who it was on Loose Ends (I missed a bit while cooking dinner), but he'd written a book which seemed of the grumpy comic complaining about everyone type and one of the things he said from the book was that he hated people claiming to have food intolerances.  (Possibly he just hated people who HAD food intolerances.)

Before-the-cut disclaimer: I have at least one food intolerance, so I'm not campaigning against intolerance intolerance solely on others' accounts.  All the same, there are several friends whose experiences with dietary issues and the rubbish other people dish out around them are also very much in mind.

For the record, I love dairy products as much as most and more than many.  I brought cheese sandwiches for lunch to school every day of secondary school and for a lot of university too.  I loved Brie, Cheddar (if only the mild type) and blue cheese dressing - ice cream, frozen yogurt, unfrozen yogurt, Mozzarella melted over pizza, and oh, how I loved freshly grated Parmesan.  I was NEVER of the school dismissing milk as only fit for baby humans or cows. The discovery of lactose intolerance and lactase tablets to take care of it was a wonderful thing, until they started working less and less well, and I started needing them not just for a healthy hunk of cheese in a sandwich or salad, but for milk in tea, and then needing to double up on them even for the small amount of milk in tea.  And then they stopped working altogether.   This is a very typical story, and I'm telling it not to claim special victimhood, but just to ask: what on earth can anyone possibly think they can deduce about my character from this inability to tolerate dairy? 

That said, back to the articles, the character and the hater (his words!)  The Rodale article was fairly balanced, really, and I probably wouldn't have been as annoyed had it not been for having previously read "What We're (Not) Eating", talking about an emerging problem of people (primarily young girls, it seems) with eating disorders claiming they'd been told to go gluten-free as an excuse for not eating. But still and all, saying that just 10 years ago "barely anyone knew what the word gluten meant, let alone gave any thought to avoiding it" is ridiculous - and it's in both articles (the same source is quoted, though whether the info was lifted from one article for the other or not I've no idea).  And I got annoyed at this line: "And with this popularity push, people have latched on to avoiding gluten as a cure-all for many conditions aside from celiac, including migraines, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. While some have found relief, that doesn’t mean a gluten free diet will work in all cases."  Well, really?  If there was something that worked "in all cases" for any of those three conditions, everyone suffering from one of them would just be doing it, wouldn't we?

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When working on the Arthur chapter of the History Book - which is totally steepholm's baby, BTW* it occurred to me that it would be nice to have a couple of books that didn't have any mention of Arthur to set against the ones we were discussing. Not just out of the pool of all books in the world that are not in any way Arthurian, obviously. What we were looking for is books set in the period where the historical Arthur is placed, whenever an historical Arthur is postulated. We couldn't come up with one, which seemed significant but not in any way conclusive. So, this is where we look to our extremely well-read flists. Again.

The specs are:

1) Children's or YA
2) set in Britain
3) late 5th to 6th century
4) no mention of Arthur, Arturos, Idris, Pendragon, etc.
5) We're primarily looking at books that are still being read by kids today, but it would still be useful to hear about older, more obscure ones too.

* The chapter on Arthur, that is, to which I have essentially contributed only by reading a couple of books I hated and telling steepholm they weren't going to be of any use to us. Negative reading is almost as useless as negative proof, but not quite!

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All right, it's taken me forever to finish writing up the small number of books I read over the weekend, but this at least is the last.

My goal of noting where I saw a review, recommendation or just passing mention of a book when adding it to my Goodreads to-read shelf is clearly not being met, and I've unfortunately no memory where I heard about Inconvenient, Margie Gelbwasser's first novel. I can see why I'd be interested once I did hear about it, as I generally love YA about the experiences of immigrant communities in the US (or UK), and Inconvenient is about a girl whose Russian-Jewish parents moved to the States when she was very young. The community is a hard-drinking one, and Alyssa's mother has been slipping from drinking hard into drinking too hard - the inconvenience of the title for Alyssa's family.

I almost put this one down after a few chapters - the prose wasn't doing much for me, and it seemed like a lot of pages and hours since I'd read anything that had really grabbed me. But I'm glad that tiredness didn't stop me from reading on, as I was really pretty impressed by the end. Alyssa's only real friend, Lana, has been her friend since they were little, and both are pretty much outsiders because of their background. Alyssa really doesn't care to be accepted by the cool gang, happy enough with Lana and a friend on the track team, but Lana is increasingly turning herself into someone else in order to be accepted, especially by 'the king' of their class. All this was pretty well done, and Keith, the guy on the track team turned out to be neither the unequivocal boyfriend Alyssa wants nor the jerk he seems as if he might be at times.

The greatest impact, however, comes from the portrayal of Alyssa's mother and her drinking problem, which is quite powerful. I didn't love the mother the way I loved the mother in Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost, but it was easy to see how moving from one country in which you were discriminated against for being Jewish to another, in which you're discriminated against for being Russian, with a hard-working but emotionally distant husband, in a culture where heavy drinking is just what you do, could be a disastrous mix. Especially as every time she really starts to become successful in writing magazine articles, the magazine folds, or a new (horrible) editor takes over who cuts her down continually.

Of course, despite that understanding of the factors that lead Alyssa's mother to problem-drinking, our sympathy is completely with Alyssa. Her mother goes through the typical cycles of denial, remorse and promises to stop abusing alcohol, dragging Alyssa through the again, all-too typical pattern of the family of an alcoholic. Her father is big on telling them they have to be tough, Lana increasingly excludes her, and she's not quite sure where she stands with Keith. The loneliness Alyssa feels, and the need to cover up for her mother, despite her growing frustration and desperation, are very moving.

I was telling Younger Daughter about the book when I'd finished, and she said wisely, from the sink where she was washing dishes, "Ah, the old button strings, eh?" It took me a minute to notice that something was wrong, but I quite like the phrase, combining buttons and heart-strings, very appropriately. When thinking about it afterwards, I did the usual 'this isn't my button, really' sidestep; perfectly true in one way, as certainly my mother never had a drinking problem. Of her own. Neither did my father, but yet as a child, I lived with two parental figures who did. Not my button, I thought, but only because I didn't realise that their drinking problems were problems - or rather that they were the kind of problem anyone ever did anything about. One thing about that, of course, is that you don't have the torturous see-saw of hope and disappointment Alyssa experiences. That part of the boo

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Wrapped was both the weirdest coincidence of the Challenge, and the biggest disappointment. The coincidence was that brandy_painter and I both started reading it just before bed on Saturday night, getting approximately the same amount read before going to sleep. It was the biggest disappointment, not because I disliked it most of the books I read (it didn't come even close to being the most disliked), but because it sounded great in itself and also useful for the History Project. I thought it might fit well for the formerly-called-Romp category, as a sort of YA Amelia Peabody. Regency Amelia Peabody.

There isn't much reason to repeat Brandy's list of 'Historical Liberties' taken, almost every one of which I'd flagged while reading as well. So you can read that here. There is a spoiler, but I agree that it's not one that's likely to surprise many people. And having lazily piggy-backed on her work, I'll add some of the other problems I noticed.

Lord Showalter is said to be the matrimonial catch of the year, and Agnes' father is a member of the House of Lords. This is the upper layer of Regency society, clearly. And yet at Lord Showalter's big party there's a physician, a solicitor and Agnes' best friend (and reluctant 'rival' in the pursuit of a good husband), Julia, whose father is a merchant and manufacturer. Not so much. (Think of the Bingley sisters jeering at the Bennets because one uncle is an attorney and the other lives 'somewhere near Cheapside' - who is in fact, 'a man of business'. Mr Darcy doesn't join the jeering, but does agree that it must 'very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world'. And neither he nor Bingley is even a peer.)

The language is a mess. It's meant to be 1815. Yet here's just a selection of the anachronistic language Agnes or the other characters use:

-suss out (first used in the 1960s)
-chat up (also well into the 1900s before the phrase is used)
-anti-imperialist views (when Agnes says she's not sure it's right to have all these foreign treasures in the British Museum)
-taxi (Just ??)
-Bollocks we will! (OED gives first use as 1940)

More problems:

-Agnes suggesting Caedmon call her by her first name at the end of their first real meeting.
-Lord Showalter quotes the opening line of Pride and Prejudice as an explanation of why he HAD to get himself a wife in order to carry on with his masquerade of a society dude.
-Near the end, after Agnes and Caedmon have saved England from a plot which might have caused Napoleon to win the war, she thinks there are no fireworks for her or Caedmon. 'Perhaps that's what it meant to be a servant. Only if you failed or performed sloppily did people pay attention. When you were successful, you were invisible.' Yup, your experience is *just* like that of a real servant.
-Word will be spread that Agnes is recovering from the scandal and heartache she supposedly suffered by 'residing in a convent in the Swiss Alps'. (A convent? In the Swiss Alps??)

It could have been SO much fun, and a lot of the worst mistakes could have been avoided just by a good reading of Jane Austen. Admittedly, that's true of many mistakes in life, I guess.

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I'm feeling much more tired today than I was at any time during the Challenge itself, which is odd - and also rather flat, which is less so. But, I do want to write up the remaining books read before running out of steam altogether. Speaking of steam, the girls should be kicking off soon in the Mini Marathon, though with some 40,000 people signed up for it, it'll be a while before they actually start walking. (It's a bank holiday here, BTW.)

I can't remember where I heard about Flip, but I picked it up at the summer fair. Reading it right after The Penderwicks at Point Mouette was tough, and initially I thought I was going to find the voice too irritatingly teen boy. But body switch stories can be fun in a terrifying way if well done, and I liked most things about this one, so ended getting pretty well engrossed. Alex, the protagonist, is 14, not very attractive or popular, not very well-off and from a not great area of London, a pretty good cello player and student and not at all sporty. Philip, generally known as Flip, is from a much wealthier family living in Leeds, cool and good-looking and a star of his school's cricket team. (With two girlfriends and not very good performance in school.) When Alex wakes up inexplicably in Philip's body, he's as horrified and baffled as you would be, and only wants to get home so someone can help him figure out what has happened and change him back. It would have been easy to play the 'wealthier, cooler and much more popular isn't happier' card in a rather dull way, but Flip doesn't do that, although Alex does have moments of thinking it's great to see his hair in the mirror looking perfect., and definitely enjoys being able to run without wheezing from his asthma. Needless to say, it's not as simple as just ringing his mother and being picked up and fixed.

Although the explanation for the switch didn't bear too much thinking about in terms of plausibility (what theory of body-switching would, though?) I liked the way it wasn't tied to any kind of fate or universe's intervention in order to save one or two special souls or the like. Although Alex was forced to think really hard about questions of identity and self, as well as some pretty tough moral issues, he wasn't switched in order to learn anything, which is a major plus.

A really petty thing, which must show something of how small-minded I can be in responding to books. The term used in explaining how Alex's soul/spirit/whatever had been switched into Philip's body was 'psychic evacuation'. Which reminded me how I'd sniggered at hearing a politician accuse the UK government of organising a 'sluggish evacuation'. Maybe a bit too much psychic fibre?

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Added up my reading time, rang my mother, talked to the girls about dinner, and as the official finish line doesn't seem to be up at MotherReader's yet, will have to remember to clock in there later. I'll also be coming back to do at least quick write-ups on three of the books read during the Challenge.

So. Sixth Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge stats:

Total hours spent reading & reviewing (or in the allowed proportion of audiobook listening and reading/commenting on other participants' blogs) 32 hours, 15 minutes.

Books read: 7 and about a quarter of an audiobook.

Donating €50 to Barnardos.

Interesting connections between the books? None jumped out at me this year. Will think about it as I walk down to buy groceries.

Degree of challenge? It seemed surprisingly easy this year! I'm still slower than most of the world, and finishing a few of the books demanded my trademark iron discipline (for anyone who doesn't know me, that's 100% sarcastic), but being able to switch from iPod and audiobook to print book so I didn't waste time while feeding the dogs or myself helped a lot, and as always, it was great that there were so many people participating. Also, glasses instead of contacts for the weekend made continuous reading much easier. A detail I'm sure everyone finds deeply fascinating.

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Finished Lady Macbeth's Daughter last night, quite late, and went into the next book up instead of trying to write anything then. I'd ordered it as potentially useful for the History Book, and in a way it is, but in another way, not so much.  A slightly odd thing about several of the children's/YA books I've read that are strongly intertextual (in an apparently-homagey way) is that they blunder into appearing to suggest that the author of the modern book is cleverer/more inventive than the author of the original.  I don't want to take up the remaining Challenge hours finding links to my old posts, but for examples, one book that I read and thought pretty bad suggested this about Chaucer, one I never wrote up did so with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and the audiobook I'm currently listening to just tipped over from confused to almost saying it outright about Dickens.  (Seriously? Dickens the character just told the heroine of the book that if he'd known her before writing Little Dorrit, it would have been a better book.)

Lady Macbeth's Daughter doesn't come close to implying that it's better than Macbeth.  I think the premise - that Lady M had a daughter, and was driven mad by grief of losing her, (all that nasty Macbeth's doing, obsessed as he was with having a son) long before she went mad from guilt - is an interesting one.  Whether you go the old-fashioned way and consider Macbeth a story of pure evil unleashed or all-out Marxist criticism and read it as a story of a man destroyed by being at the changing-point from feudal to modern economic systems*, or somewhere between the two, there is still a fair amount of space left for a bit more motivation. The only problem I found with that in Lady Macbeth's Daughter is that Lady M isn't portrayed as woman made evil by grief consistently enough for it to work. Okay, I also thought Fleance was a bit of a jerk, Albia's love for him not too engaging, and the end a little hacked-off seeming.  And I've got a completely irrational thing about girls getting their periods first time and its being explained to them in mystical terms. Here: "You're not dying, my friend. The goddess Banrigh has visited you" made me more than a bit queasy.

I did like the descriptions of the landscape and scenery, and there were a lot of interesting touches, including a good author's note at the end, discussing Shakespeare's use of Holinshed's history of Macbeth.

* I could probably come up with the reference, if anyone wants it.

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I know I still haven't written up my second book, Flip, but I'll get to it.

Devil's Kiss was recommended to me in a bookshop in town, when I said I was looking for historical YA set in Britain for the History Book. (All right, this was after I'd probably horribly insulted the woman in charge of the children's section, by reacting in dismay when she tried to recommend I, Coriander to me.) (I did behave well by going along with a compromise, which is that the history is rubbish in it, but the rest of the story makes up for it. Nothing could make up for the abuse of history in that book.) (I'm getting seriously sidetracked - a bit punch-drunk at this stage.)

Anyway, Devil's Kiss has the Knights Templar still active in modern London, and aside from a bit of backstory, which isn't even set in Britain, it's got nothing historical in it. But, it's not a bad story, so I'm not sorry for the false lead. There's quite a bit of good stuff in here, including Satan (how he's done, that is) and the different orders of Angels, and the fact that Billie's mother was Muslim, and the resistance to Billie's becoming a member of the Order is that she's a girl. The characters may have been a bit two-dimensional, but the story - of the tiny, beleaguered Order's fight against evil - suits that fairly well. Billie's more than a bit thick about how her father, Arthur (Master of the Order) actually feels about her, but her childhood's not exactly set her up for developing a great deal of emotional insight. It's a dark story, and the small group of Knights is a lot smaller at the end, but I didn't find it too wrenching, which isn't entirely a good sign, but I'll pick up the sequel all the same. Not *just* for the cover, though that does look good.

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... or perhaps the not so great anything.

It's probably pretty clear by now that this book was not my cup of tea. There was no more fat-bashing, after that first chapter, but that might have been because we were in the company of figures of lofty birth (although they themselves often don't know it), elves, priestesses of the Order -- y'know, nobody who'd be fat.

We also seemed to be in the presence of Tolkien, with intermittent visits from Lloyd Alexander and George Lucas (in his Star Wars guise), but, shockingly, this book wasn't done anything near as well as they did their respective bits. The poetry! The Dark Lord! Stupid Elli shaking her stupid curls all the time!

I really wish I hadn't wasted so much of my Challenge time on this, but there's still plenty left, happily.

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29 pages into The Great Tree of Avalon and already found it irritatingly over-anxious to make the point (the rocks changing colours with the seasons was nice, but then Tamwyn had to go and say that the idea of trees changing colours was really difficult to imagine) and obnoxious about fatness. Oh goody, more than 300 pages to go.

I'll come back to my second book after breakfast.

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Funeral first. People never cease to amaze me, one way or another. In this case, the amazement is the good sort, as the wife and daughter of the man who had died made it through the funeral without obvious tears. *I* was in tears - not because I knew him that well, but out of sorrow for his wife (who is a lovely woman) and just - you know, funerals. Loss. Grief.

The music was a tiny bit different, in that I haven't heard "Onward, Christian Soldiers" sung for quite some time, and it was the only hymn not explained (as Bindon's favourite, or written by a friend, sort of thing). But we ended with "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind", which was apparently his school song, and was incredibly moving. Church was absolutely full, and we really raised the rafters on "Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire", to fade to a hush on the last words spoken or sung in the service:

O still, small voice of calm,
O still, small voice of calm.

Shortly afterwards, the church was once again buzzing, as we returned to put all the sorted books back out on the pews and tables. Saturday went well overall, and though we were down workers, Becca, Younger Daughter and I were just able to get our books better sorted than ever, and help everyone who wanted help.

This year we had TWO full boxes of Enid Blyton books - making her the winner in the Annual Most Books Here authorial race. It's between Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl, pretty much, with the occasional mini-surge for books used in school, like Goodnight Mister Tom and Under the Hawthorn Tree. I was rather dispirited initially by the profusion of the Big Three, the enthusiasm with which people dove into those, while ignoring some other authors, and my failure to find any of my requested books. However, I cheered right up with the pushing of 2 copies of Magicians of Caprona and one of The Merlin Conspiracy, Arthur at the Crossing Places, a Gabrielle Zavin and our two Hilary McKays - and in a very last-minute rescue, The Thief and Queen of Attolia went to a good home with an adult reader.

The kids seemed even cuter than normal this year - I had one little girl walk in the back of the church, go as if magnetized to the box right in front of me, pick up a book and squee over it so hard I thought she might pass out when I showed her two more books by the same author. And the tiny ones passing over their 10 cents like real, big kids were delightful. Y.D. had one little boy ask her how much he could buy with 1 cent. When he showed her his 'cent' it was actually a Euro, and he bellowed out "Dad! The lady said I could get LOTS of books with my money!" in glee. My kind of kid! Y.D. also had a bunch of people (adults) gripe or use a nasty ignoring-finagling combo over the (incredibly cheap) price of books. Not so much my kind of people.

One of the fair organisers fell off a ladder, though I didn't see this, as we were re-boxing leftovers in the church. As he was fine, I can say that you'd have expected a bit more of an understanding of the laws of gravity from a lecturer in engineering! These were not short little ladders, either, as they were taking down the bunting and signs.

When I finally got to bed last night, I was in that too-tired-to-sleep state. Not quite managing to go to sleep, but obviously not really awake either, I kept seeing people come up to me and ask "How much for these books?"

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