cyphomandra

Mary Ellen, Craterean, Chaz Brenchey
Firefly Lane, Kristin Hannah
The earl who isn’t, Courtney Milan
My fair Brady, Brian D Kennedy
The pairing, Casey McQuiston

What was I doing in September? Vast amounts of gaming, since you ask, about which I shall post more shortly.

Mary Ellen, Craterean. Mary Ellen is a farm girl; she loves reading and research, but her family have neither the money nor the extra workers to send her to school. The a visiting author recognises her talent and arranges for a scholarship to the Crater School. Mary Ellen plunges into school life with enthusiasm - but, unexpectedly, her own learning is about to put her scholarship in danger…

I thought the central dilemma in this one was interesting but somehow it all didn’t quite click together; there’s a lot going on and a lot of characters to catch up with. I will certainly keep reading them, though!

Firefly Lane, Kristin Hannah. This is basically Beaches set 20 years later and with less singing. Kate is an uncool teenager who makes friends with new girl Tully, her apparent opposite, who is wounded by her past and determined to succeed; their friendship endures even as they lead very different lives (Tully childless but successful, Kate losing herself in her family), etc etc etc and then the obligatory tearjerker ending. Hannah’s writing is all very readable but as with her historicals things fall apart if you look too closely.

The Earl who Isn’t, Courtney Milan. Third in Milan’s Wedgeford Trials series, set in a small town in England with a largely Asian population. Andrew Uchida is aware that he is heir to an Earldom but would much rather grow long beans; unfortunately, the impetuous Lily so determined to uncover his past. As is often the case with Milan I liked the world building more than the romance (I mean it’s fine, I don’t dislike it but I already can’t remember much about the tensions/resolutions). I do like Milan’s focus on the problems with hereditary nobility and colonialism.

My fair Brady, Brian D Kennedy. Over-the-top theatre kid Wade is devastated when a) his boyfriend dumps him for being too self-obsessed and b) said ex gets the lead in the school production of My Fair Lady. Determined to win his ex back, Wade decides to impress him by making over Elijah Brady, a shy and awkward fellow student who has joined the crew of the production in an attempt to break out of his shell. Mostly predictable but entertaining.

The pairing, Casey McQuiston. Disaster bisexuals Theo and Kit with previous bad ending to their relationship meet up again on an extravagant gourmet food tour across Europe. They decide to compete to see who can hook up the most during the tour to prove how over each other they are, you can guess the rest. I thought I would like this more but it’s so shallow and one note - everyone is beautiful, everyone is bi, all the travel is smooth (one of the things I love about travel is the inherent inevitability of chaos!) and all the food is amazing in such a way that it all blurs together; there’s no specificity. Equally, there are no consequences for anything (Theo is apparently trying to get a struggling food truck business off the ground; but their family are wealthy, their sisters are film stars, and at no point in the trip does money appear to be even a hint of a problem). In addition, and irritating for a romance, most of the emotional work in this story happens off-stage and I am unconvinced the couple will even make it through their next argument.

Best this month was definitely Wed Wabbit, with thanks to rachelmanija, for pointing me at it. I liked both the Westover and Bradbury memoirs but didn't love them.

A Novella Collection, Courtney Milan (title both accurate and completely unhelpful).
Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase.
The Crown of Success, A.L.O.E (re-read).
Whiteout, Thaw, Heatwave, Changing Colors, Elyse Springer (the Seasons of Love series).
The Rúin, Dervla McTiernan.
Firefighter Griffin, Zoe Chant.
For the Good of the School, Doris Pocock.
Educated, Tara Westover.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Kate Bradbury.
Trailer Trash, Marie Sexton.
Wed Wabbit, Lissa Evans.
Shotgun, Marie Sexton.
How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliantly Speaking, Viv Groskop.
Viscount Vagabond, Loretta Chase.
A Deeper Blue, S.E. Harmon.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn, Dana Simpson.
Becoming, Michelle Obama.
Dogfight, Hot Air, Donovan Bixley.
Roped In, LA Witt.
The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald.
Catch Me When You Fall, Eileen Merriman.

( Reviews under cut. )

I still have the rest of 2017 to write up, but onwards.

Courtney Milan, Unveiled, Unlocked, Unclaimed, Unraveled (the Turner Brothers series)
Joanna Cannan, Gaze at the Moon
Catherine Storr, Vicky
Anne Saunders, St Brenda's Headache

( Courtney Milan, Unveiled, Unlocked, Unclaimed, Unraveled. )

Joanna Cannan, Gaze at the Moon. I am slowly ambling through Jane Badger's Heroines on Horseback; the Pony Book on Children's Fiction and read this after reading the bit on Cannan. This is Cannan's last children's book and the setting is different from earlier; Dinah lives in a council house with a family who do not understand her twin desires to own a horse and to be an artist. It's competent and quiet, and Dinah earns her horse (and art; I particularly like that she spends a lot of time working on drawing in a way that feels right). My copy has an enthusiastic comment on it from Noel Streatfeild complaining that the only problem with it is that it's too short, which is about right. It's very vivid and exact in its detail.

Catherine Storr, Vicky. This is the sequel to The Chinese Egg, which I last read when I was about 14 or so, although I remember a surprising amount with a clarity that escapes me for, say, something I did last week. But the book I remember was more supernatural, which this isn't; it's something Storr's done before, with the mundane Marianne and Mark as a sequel to the brilliantly terrifying Marianne Dreams, and I feel that maybe she's saying something about growing up that I'm not entirely happy with. The other problem with this - which is a perfectly competent story about Vicky, who is adopted, trying to track down her birth parents after her adoptive mother dies - is that there is a really odd and rather unpleasant plot line in this where the police officer in his 40s who was helped by Vicky and Stephen in the kidnapping case that underpins The Chinese Egg is quite clearly sexually interested in Vicky, who's about 15. Nothing overtly physical eventuates, but it's there. In addition the book does not resolve the puzzle of the egg, which is still left hanging. I have not poked around enough in Storr's bibliography to see if there definitely isn't a third book, though.

Anne Saunders, St Brenda's Headache. Re-read. My mother had/still has a copy of this, and it was my favourite of her old school stories; I finally managed to track down a copy of my own, as she's holding on to hers firmly as it was her favourite as well. Anne Saunders wrote a lot of other stories about St Brenda's that all appeared in magazines that I've never tracked down, although I caught a few in annuals. Perhaps because of that the characters have a depth and a history to them that makes them more than just stereotypes, which otherwise they are - the sporty girl, the American (as always, daughter of a millionaire), the form captain, the fat girl (arrgh), the sneak, the understanding headmistress. The plot is also a favourite of mine - the unjustly accused is redeemed by a perceptive other, who has to contend with their peers to do so - and I'm not sure now how much of my fondness is in fact entirely driven by this book. Charmain LeRoy arrives at St Brenda's, a new girl distinguished by her poise and talents - and her murky past, which turns out to involve being sent to a reform school for theft. Judy, the form captain, embarks on a mission to find the truth of this story which Charmain initially tries to block; another less noble student uses this knowledge to frame Charmain for various petty crimes that escalate. It's deftly drawn and it's well-paced and I don't think I can judge it clearly, but for me it still works, and the emotions ring true. I wish I had her other stories to read.

Over a month's worth.

Finished:

Tana French, The Trespasser. I liked this, although still not as much as The Secret Place. It follows Antoinette Conway from that book, investigating what appears to be an open and shut case of murder of a young woman and dealing with the fact that the rest of the squad apparently dislike her to the point of sabotage. It does not have a moment when Antoinette says, "This was the moment when I had the chance to do something different, but instead I stuffed everything up," (or similar) and it has a happyish ending, and there are lots of bits I liked about it (the resolution of the storyline with her father), but the case itself didn't grab me on this one.

Dick Francis, Comeback. Solidly middle-tier Francis in which a diplomat between posts finds himself investigating sabotage at a veterinary practice. The main character spent time in the town as a child and has his own memories of people/places, but because his name is different and he is now an adult there is an element of working undercover, which I liked, and there’s a vivid and startling image when the sabotage turns to murder, but the rest of this is fairly forgettable (the love interest is appealing as a character but the romance works even less well than usual).

A Notable Woman: the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited Simon Garfield. Mentioned elsewhere. This was great. I put heaps of little bookmarks in when reading, but had no time to go back through it; basically, though, an excellent example of illustrating the general through the particularly, but also an excellent example of a particular experience - that of a single woman - that is all too often overlooked. You do get a sense of her crystallising in her 40s; the journals are shorter, her attitudes less flexible, and I do think about this as I'm in the same decade. I think it's common but not inevitable; Doris Lessing's memoirs don't do this for one, although I'm not keen to emulate her in many other respects.

Matthew Reilly, The Four Legendary Kingdoms. Latest in the series that started with Seven Ancient Wonders and is counting down, this one has Jack West Jr kidnapped to participate in the deadly games of a secret underworld kingdom that will serve the dual purposes of signalling to extraterrestrial intelligences that Earth's existence should continue and also granting power to one of the secret kingdoms that rule the world. Also, Scarecrow (from Reilly's other series) shows up as a rival competitor. I am not remotely in these for anything other than the ride, and on that level they work fine. I particularly like all the little diagrams of the ridiculously over-engineered challenges. If you are going to read any of Reilly's books I would pick this series or Hovercar Racer, although I really should read his first two as well.

Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call, or The Distinguished Thing. 1930s set murder mystery with East End (London) theatre backdrop; I really liked the worldbuilding and the characters, who are vivid and complex and interact with each other in interesting and unexpected ways, but then it fell apart at the end. This, I think, is largely because the murderer themselves is not so well characterised, and so the denouement falters.

[redacted for Yuletide] 2 books.

And then I discovered how to load ebooks from the library's extensive digital catalogue onto my Kobo *and* had to spend a lot of time sitting in a darkened room with it.

JL Merrow, Played! – actor hiding out in Shamwell before taking up the finance job his father favours entangles himself with local dyslexic repairman, who he gets to coach as Bottom in the local theatre group’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hard to go wrong with this set up.

JL Merrow, Out! Closeted workaholic quits his job and offers to take in teenage daughter when ex-wife is having trouble coping, and gets entangled with a charity worker who is not going to pretend not to be gay for anyone. This is a lot slighter and after I finished it I kept wondering if I’d forgotten to read the end.

Courtney Milan, Trade Me. Tina Chen is a poor student who, after an argument, swaps lives with Blake Reynolds, the handsome billionaire who just happens to be in one of her classes. I read this for Tina, really, because she's a great character who actually has a family and friends and a context, but I didn't have much time for Blake and the denouement with his dad and the product launch felt horribly cringe-inducing.

Stephen King, Blockade Billy. Novella length piece about baseball, pretty much all voice and imagery, but it stuck with me.

Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller: writing lessons and more from 27 years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. Part history/memoir, part teaching guide. Bits of this were more helpful than others (there's some repetition as well), and it's also very much an original Clarion book (I went to Clarion West) in talking about the Clarion experience itself. Worthwhile.

KA Mitchell, Ready or Knot books 1 (Put a Ring on It) and 2 (Risk Everything on It). Marriage-themed collection about 4 gay friends. Book 1 has the up-and-coming Broadway director Theo and his introverted Korean IT boyfriend dealing with the fallout after Theo’s massively public all-singing, all-dancing, Times Square proposal goes viral, book 2 is closeted former child star Jax starts a relationship with recently separated Oz, who parents two foster children with intermittent involvement from his scatty (male) ex, and does not want any more drama or lack of commitment. I do like that KA Mitchell has a lot of non-white protagonists (Oz is black and his ex Latino), and I do actually like the characters, but these are pretty slight. Everyone is super successful and rich, and there’s a lot of skimming over things – in book 1 both characters go off and have relationship epiphanies off-stage (at different times), then come back and narrate them to their partner, which successfully dulls the impact. Book 3 will deal with the last two friends, who have an on-again, off-again thing going, which is not my favourite trope but if the library has it I suspect I'll read it anyway.

In progress:

[Redacted for Yuletide]

Elin Gregory, Eleventh Hour. Historical m/m. I got about one chapter in and got distracted by something, will go back.

Lyn Gala, Mountain Prey. Contemporary small town m/m with a lead who is out on forest patrol when a handsome stranger seeking revenge on a criminal bad guy captures him and ties him up a lot, which is great because Stunt (the lead) really likes being tied up. I think this is just not working for me but I'm not sure why, given some of the stuff I've happily put up with previously.

Kate Sherwood, Dark Horse. M/M contemporary romance with the most glacial slow build ever - I think I was about 300 pages in before anyone had sex (and not within what I presume is the end-game relationship) *but* this is mostly because the lead, Dan, is grieving the loss of his long-term partner and also because he does have a job - training horses to compete in eventing - and there's a lot of horse in here, too. I do think it could have done with an edit, but it's doing quite a bit that I don't usually see in m/m (other details redacted for spoilers) and it's worth reading.

Up next:

I have been eyeing up my unread manga pile wistfully, but realistically All Yuletide All the Time.