A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Perhaps surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for Phyllis Ann Karr’s Frostflower and Thorn, I actually quite enjoyed Frostflower and Windbourne. I enjoyed Frostflower and Thorn’s established friendship and I liked the further fleshing out of the worldbuilding, which I had thought was rather thin in book one, but it came together elegantly here. I particularly liked the solution to the mystery ( spoilers )

I knew from the start that there are only two books in this series, but having finished the second one, I wonder if Karr didn’t originally plan to write more. The conclusion is satisfying, but it leaves a lot of open ends loose in a way that suggests she was planting hooks for a possible sequel.

I also read Elizabeth Goudge’s The Lost Angel, a set of short stories, some Christmas-themed. Uneven as short story collections are wont to be. My favorite was the title story, about a little boy who is supposed to play an angel in the Nativity play but escapes from dress rehearsal and wanders around London dressed as an angel.

And I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s short story “Seth.” A homely and retiring young man arrives at a mine in Tennessee, hoping for employment, as the mine is owned by a native of his hometown. The handsome young mine owner indeed hires him, and Seth is in return devoted to him. Meanwhile, Bess the landlord’s sharp-tongued daughter seems softer on Seth than she has ever seemed to a young man before, so people tease her she’s sweet on him, to which she responds “Happen I am.”

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve reached the tragic part in The Life of Charlotte Bronte, where everyone starts dying. First Branwell, and that’s tragic because he never accomplished anything and was in fact a misery to everyone who knew him for the last three years of his life. Then Emily, whose death is differently tragic, because Emily refuses to ask for help or even admit she’s sick till her dying day, when she finally acquiesces to see a doctor mere hours before she dies. And now Anne, who is willing to let Charlotte and the doctors try to help, but nonetheless is fading, fading…

What I Plan to Read Next

Contemplating which Rumer Godden book to read next. The ones I have easy access to are Four Dolls, The Dark Horse, and The River. I’m leaning toward Four Dolls because I usually like Godden’s children’s books better than her adult books, but then again there is In This House of Brede batting one thousand for the adult books... so I thought I’d see if anyone has a strong opinion about the other two.

Today is my birthday! As per usual on my birthday, I have enjoyed my free Starbucks hot chocolate plus a birthday book, in this case Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Editha’s Burglar, in an extremely shabby copy which I found on my grandparents’ shelf years ago when I was sorting through their old books.

The book's shabby exterior encases a delightful story! Hearing a sound in the night, young Editha goes downstairs and politely asks the burglar not to make too much noise as he steals the silver, as her mother would be frightened if she woke up to hear a burglar. This is really more of a short story than a book, bulked up with some charming illustrations, and just the right size for a quick birthday read.

I also intend to begin Rebecca Fraimow’s Lady Eve’s Last Con, but somehow a number of errands have snuck into my plans for a quiet and restful birthday, so we shall see. Perhaps after the brownies are in the oven.

When you read a Frances Hodgson Burnett book, you always know that you’re in for a wild ride, and despite its staid title, The Shuttle delivers.

The shuttle of the title is metaphorical: Burnett is referring to the ever-tightening web of ties that bind together America and England, in the form of steamship travel, telegraph lines, and immigration. Burnett herself grew up in England, but moved to America as a teenager. Since she was able to write American characters who actually sound American (RIP Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker), she was perfectly positioned to write novels about English and American culture clash, and wrote at least three: A Fair Barbarian (an American girl descends on an English town and wreaks delightful havoc), T. Tembaron (a slangy but good-hearted New York salesman inherits an English title and wreaks delightful havoc), and The Shuttle.

There is, of course, another famous form of this English and American interweaving: the marriage of rich American heiresses to impoverished English nobles. The book begins with one such marriage: Rosalie Vanderpoel, daughter of the immensely wealthy New York Vanderpoels, marries impoverished Nigel Anstruthers.

Once he’s put an ocean between Rosalie and her family, Nigel reveals himself a total blackguard: not only did he marry Rosalie for her money, but he’s not even going to use that money to put his estate Stornham Court in order! Instead, he hies himself to the gaming tables of Europe, returning occasionally to bully Rosalie mercilessly, while his tenants’ cottages fall down. And so matters stand for over a decade, until Rosalie’s indomitable little sister Betty grows up…

Now, I must say it rather strained my credulity that Rosalie’s adoring and immensely rich father, who is constantly traveling back and forth between Europe and America, never stopped by the estate to see why his hitherto sweet and loving daughter had almost entirely broken off contact with her birth family. But of course if he did, there would be nothing for Betty to do, and therefore no book! So one must simply suspend one’s disbelief on this point.

The indomitable Betty is a Burnett heroine in the heroic strain of Joan Lowrie, a gorgeous Amazon of a girl who faces down every obstacle with tenacious grit and fabulous amounts of money. She arrives at Stornham Court while Nigel is away, discovers the house and village almost in ruins and Rosalie nearly broken in spirit, and at once sets about putting everything to rights. After all, Rosalie’s son Ughtred (yes, Ughtred) will inherit one day, and we can’t be letting the estate fall to pieces in the meantime.

But then Nigel comes back. He is at first appalled, then against his will fascinated, by this beautiful creature who has blithely turned his life upside down. Soon he is making scenes where he threatens her, as Betty informs him, like a melodramatic Victorian villain, culminating at the climax in a scene where he finds Betty injured in a lonely abandoned cottage after she has been thrown by her horse… A very tense and suspenseful scene. Betty manages to hide, but her sprained ankle means she can't try to run; she just has to wait while Nigel searches, clutching her riding crop with the last-ditch plan to strike him across the eyes if he finds her…

( Spoilers )

I thought the book was a bit longer than it needed to be - I’ve felt that about many of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s adult books, it occurs to me - but nonetheless I enjoyed it very much. This book was a huge bestseller when it came out, so characteristic of its moment that it’s mentioned in one of the later Betsy-Tacy books as a novel the characters are reading, and it’s still a cracking good read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Joan G. Robinson’s Charley, also sometimes called The Girl Who Ran Away, an enchanting book about - well, a girl who runs away! Through a series of miscommunications, no one realizes that young Charley never arrived at the house of the relation with whom she was meant to spend a holiday. Instead Charley spends a week on her own, making a home for herself in an old hen house and beneath a chestnut tree, finding food and a source of water and wandering in a beautiful copse where she makes up adventures for herself and an imaginary animal companion, a beautiful fawn.

Highly recommended if you like books about runaway children, with lots of rich detail about finding food and water and just generally looking after themselves. Charley comes to the end of her resources a little more swiftly than the Boxcar Children, but she has a wonderful time while it lasts.

I also finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom! It 100% turned out just as I expected - this is not a book that you read for surprises - but there’s great pleasure in watching Burnett do a fairly realistic take on a melodramatic plot involving a wandering amnesiac, the unexpected inheritance of a vast English estate, a haughty society beauty, and a self-made fortune from an invention in which Burnett is so uninterested that she simply calls in “the invention.” What does it do? What industry is it used in? Who knows! Who cares! Burnett certainly doesn’t, and honestly it’s inspiring how she flings such trifles aside to focus on the culture clash between a New York street kid made good and the fascinated gentry who live in the county around the estate he just inherited.

And I read ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I expected to love and ended up hating. I am just extremely over stories where the protagonist kills a bunch of redshirts, and the narrative treats this as a quirky and even adorable personality flaw (Nimona just gets kinda murdery out on heists sometimes! Lookit, she turns into a dragon to do it, so fun), and the protagonist’s friends give her a mild scolding and then continue to shower her with love and acceptance.

I also hate that this story seems completely unable to grasp that there is a difference between “persecuted for being a shapeshifter!” (insert allegory for minority of choice here) and “prosecuted for destroying a WHOLE CITY with MANY CASUALTIES!” and treats ANY attempt to stop Nimona from murdering again as an example of the first. The ONLY allowable method of stopping her is to shower her with love and acceptance until she decides maybe she wants to stop.

And of course the book expects us to root for Nimona and presents “Nimona roams free!” as a happy ending, when she’s just spent the whole book killing people and she’s clearly going to kill again as soon as she feels like it.

What I’m Reading Now

I really meant to keep going with Black Narcissus and Sensational but then my hold on Emily Henry’s Book Lovers came in and as there are 479 holds on it (sadly this is not an exaggeration) I thought that PERHAPS I ought to prioritize that. I’ve enjoyed all of Henry’s books but so far this is a strong contender for my new favorite. Love the protagonist, a literary agent so intense that her colleagues call her the Shark, love her relationship with her sister, tentatively loving her dynamic with the love interest but we’ll see how that develops over the book.

In Dracula, Jonathan Harker has crawled along a ledge outside Dracula’s castle to sneak into Dracula’s room and thereby discovered that the count sleeps in a coffin in the crypt! Fascinating information no doubt but I personally hope that Harker soon turns his attention to the life-or-death question of “How is he going to escape?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Have discovered that the library has David Sweetman’s biography of Mary Renault and I am contemplating whether to read it now or to wait until I’ve read all or at least almost all of Mary Renault’s books. (No one has anything nice to say about Funeral Games so I may… just… not read that one.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I finished Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, about which I had more mixed feelings than about The Haunting. It does many of the same things just as well as The Haunting: the family relationships (here, I particularly liked Laura’s relationship with her mother Kate), the uncanny magic. But it also has a romance that I can only describe as EXTREMELY 80s (the book was published in 1984), in which school prefect Sorenson backs our heroine Laura into a wall and fondles her breast and then they joke about whether this is sexual harrassment. I think in fact it is!

My theory is that Sorry (I also just can’t with this nickname) is trying to prove that, although he is a boy witch (which is quite rare; most witches are girls), he is a normal boy in OTHER ways. But for goodness sake, Sorry, couldn’t you overcompensate in a way that is NOT groping our heroine?

Edward Prime-Stevenson’s White Cockades confirmed my impression of Prime-Stevenson’s extremely moderate gifts as a writer of fiction. Prime-Stevenson wrote the book to be as slashy as possible (he later recommended it as a book with Uranian undertones in The Intersexes, a nonfiction book about what would eventually be called homosexuality, written under a different penname), and it’s got all the ingredients - the heroes are fascinated by each other at first meeting! And one gives the other a ring! And they swear “whither thou goest, I will go!” - but somehow it doesn’t achieve the depth of emotion of, say, Anne Shirley sobbing in the window seat because someday Diana will get married.

I also read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again, which to be honest I found so depressing that I struggled to finish it. This is the result of an unfortunate collision between the book’s proposed systemic changes to fix some of the reasons why many people are finding it increasingly hard to focus nowadays (very short version: web designers designed many websites to be addictive and distracting because it maximizes their profits), and my current low-key despair about the US ever getting it together to ever make any systemic changes. Or at least any good ones.

What I’m Reading Now

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembaron has become my “book to read on my cell phone when I am in line,” which means that progress is slow but ALSO means that every time I am in line I am all “YES, it’s Tembaron time!!!”, which means the slow progress is worth it.

Tembaron has acquired a friend with amnesia AND ALSO inherited a fortune! (Likelihood that the friend with amnesia is actually the lost heir to said fortune: low, but I wouldn’t put it past Burnett!) He is now on his way to England and I am VERY curious to see how English society feels about this slangy New York street urchin with a heart of gold.

In Dracula news, Jonathan Harker has been MENACED by three SEXY LADY VAMPIRES, only to be saved by Dracula who announced to the sexy lady vampires that Jonathan Harker is HIS and then bridal carrying Harker to his room. (I’m making an assumption re: bridal carry, as Harker swooned at the psychological moment.) This book is SO much.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will I finally start reading the physical books on my TBR shelf instead of checking yet more books out from the library? I’ve been meaning to do this for months now, but I keep getting seduced by just one more library book.

When the Artcraft showed Agniezka Holland’s The Secret Garden, I was there with bells on. Who doesn’t want to see that beautiful garden on the big screen? And it’s exactly as enchanting as you might expect.

In some ways, the adaptation hasn’t aged well. I suspect that a modern adaptation would deal with India more thoughtfully. (It feels weird to consider an adaptation from the early 1990s not modern, but it is almost thirty years ago.) And, this one is pandemic specific, but the scene where Mary refuses to wear a mask in Colin’s room, thrusting it away while snarling “I can’t breathe,” caused some audible gasps in the theater.

But I suspect that a modern adaptation would want to make The Secret Garden Dark, Man, Dark, which would be awful. What makes this movie sing is its unironic embrace of the source material. Frances Hodgson Burnett was a writer with absolutely zero restraint, and this movie just goes for it.

The MOST gothic house, the literal wails of a child resounding through its halls. The EMOEST tortured Byronic uncle (his hairstyle never fails to make me laugh). The secret garden behind the high ivy-covered walls which comes to life like the platonic ideal of a garden. Dickon with animals following him around like he’s a Disney princess! Children’s book adaptations should all be made by people who love the source this much.

Best of all, I love Mary and Colin, who are both SO incredibly bratty, but in a way which speaks to the bratty child in us all. I don’t usually enjoy bratty children in movies because they often seem to exist simply to be annoying, but with Mary and Colin you have a sense of their interiority: they act like this because they don’t know how else to behave. Once they meet each other, they finally have some impetus to modify their behavior, because they can see the other won’t be their friend if they remain in Full Brat mode all the time.

Also it’s just so great when they start full-throatedly shouting at each other. It feels so cathartic to watch them express their feelings with such! great! verve!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The next two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, The Truth about Stacey and Mary Anne Saves the Day. You know, I read a lot of BSC back in the day, but I guess I never read any of the first few books in the series, so it’s been kind of delightful to meet my favorite old characters again in a new format in new-to-me stories.

I’ve also reread Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America as research for my next book - or rather the parts of it that are about the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair chapters and the murder chapters are quite separate: you can read one without the other. This book is so good at creating that “you are there” feeling that is so delicious in reading about history. I suppose the book would have been less of a success this way, but I wish he’d dropped the murder chapters entirely and filled the book with even more description of the fair: a fuller description of a performance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a walk around the Algerian Village, more detail about the exhibits on view in the great white palaces.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner. During a chapter about public amusements (Stowe is in favor, and feels that church censoriousness tends to turn amusements that could be innocent into corrupting influences), Stowe talks a bit about public amusements in Germany, which people attend with “their faces radiant with that mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be characteristic of the nation.”

I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany.

Other things this chapter taught me: Sunday school fetes and picnics (like the one Anne is so wild to attend in Anne of Green Gables were an innovation of the 1860s. Who knew? It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I’m enjoying more than the Bastables. (Sorry, Bastables.) The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!

I’ve also just begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. This is research for my World’s Fair book - but it should be very pleasant research indeed! I can’t wait to find out what FHB made of the World’s Fair.

We haven’t gotten to the fair yet, though; right now the Two Pilgrims (Meg and Robin) are stuck at their Aunt Matilda’s farm, a large and successful operation that she manages on her own as a female farmer.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve discovered that my library has a copy of Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet. Well, clearly my fate is sealed! I must read it!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, which has many good points - I enjoyed its sketch of a rural idyll - but ends quite abruptly; I did a bit of hunting and it turns out that she and her editor had a misunderstanding about how much space the story would get, so she had to wrap it up all of a sudden even though she had a longer ending planned.

I imagine she might have lengthened it later, but she dived into Wives and Daughters right after (which I haven’t read, and really ought to) and then died, so she didn’t have the chance. Ah well.

I loved Joan G. Robinson’s When Marnie Was There so much that I snagged The Teddy Robinson Storybook, which is the only other one of her books that my library has. It’s for much younger children and hasn’t grabbed me by the heart like When Marnie Was There, although the teddy bear illustrations are adorable and full of character.

What I’m Reading Now

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s. Joan Lowrie, the eponymous heroine, is a pit girl of heroic stature and even more heroic character, who bravely steps up to protect a former pit girl who has turned up with an illegitimate child. Joan lifts the baby high so all can see, and castigates them all for attacking such a poor helpless creature, and takes the girl and her baby into her own house so they won’t starve in the streets.

Joan is fabulous. She has also become embroiled in a love quadrangle, in which all the characters involved are far too noble and love each other too much to allow their jealousy to destroy their friendships, and indeed leap at the chance to promote their friend’s love affairs at their own expense: suffering all the while, but making the sacrifice willingly.

Also, Joan has been fearlessly traipsing around in the dark of the night to protect the man she loves from the depredations of her evil father, who was discharged for putting the mine in danger of an explosion and wants VENGEANCE. But he shall not have it while Joan is alive to interpose herself between them!

This is the kind of quality Frances Hodgson Burnett action that I am all about. Channel my id some more, Burnett! (Also I think all four of them will be happily coupled by the end, once one of them unbends enough to actually speak the name of his beloved, LOOKING AT YOU DERRICK, a lot of trouble could have been avoided if you had just said “I love Joan Lowrie” outright when you asked your friend for advice.)

I’ve also started reaching Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which honestly has been a bit of a slog so far: he’s talking about the history of psychedelics and their legal status and honestly I am just here to learn what they have to tell us about Consciousness et al.

I’m having a similar problem with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870: the title promises plural marriage and women’s place in early Mormonism, but so far the book is mostly following Wilford Woodruff around on his missionary work, with occasional mentions of women he met on the way.

I realize that when one is writing history one must to a certain extent follow the evidence, and Woodruff kept a very thorough diary which makes him a potentially invaluable source, although possibly for a different book. I’m here to read about women, not Woodruff. We’ll see if it gets more interesting once plural marriage begins.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m contemplating interlibrary loaning some of Joan G. Robinson’s books for older children.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Two Franceses this week! Frances Hodgson Burnett’s My Robin and Frances Little’s The House of the Misty Star.

My Robin is about the real robin which was the original of the robin in The Secret Garden. They met in an enclosed rose garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett and her robin - when the robin was still so young his breast had not yet turned red; and each day as Burnett wrote in the garden, the robin came out and stayed with her, and perched on the bamboo poles of her sun-shade and sang.

I must admit that my strongest reaction to this book was to feel that it’s quite unfortunate that Burnett lived before the age of blogs. She would have been a fantastic blogger.

Completing The House of the Misty Star means that I’ve read all of Frances Little’s novels. (I’m also closing in on Jean Webster’s complete bibliography. Fear not, however. I shall never run out of Frances Hodgson Burnett or Mrs. Oliphant.) I feel quite accomplished! Although possibly I should not as there are only six of them.

Little remained most famous throughout her life for her first book, The Lady of the Decoration, which seems to me a just verdict: that book and its sequels are by far the strongest of her work. The House of the Misty Star is fairly boilerplate Victorian romance, enlivened by the Japanese setting and by the fact that the narrator is a fifty-year-old woman, looking on the romance of the younger characters: a mixed race Japanese-American girl and an American boy. (“Didn’t Little already write that story in The Lady and Sada-San?” you ask. Well, yes, but in that version no one had amnesia. And actually Zura and Sada have very different temperaments: Zura is a rebellious artist, while Sada is much more peaceable and naive.)

Both of Little’s mixed-race heroines achieve happy endings, in case you’re curious. I really wish I had read these books back when I was working on my project: they would have added something interesting to the section about race. But I guess they’re technically books for adults, so they wouldn’t have really fit into the purview of a project about books for girls anyway.

One last book this week: Diane Athill’s Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood, which is… well, as the title might lead you to expect, it’s a memoir about her childhood in England in the 1920s & 30s. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.

What I’m Reading Now

I still mean to finish Five Little Peppers someday, but I couldn’t bear the treacliness anymore, so I’ve started Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, which is fascinating in how nearly the heroine resembles the Mary Sues of the 1990s. (And quite possibly the self-insert fics teenagers write today, too. Franklin wrote the book when she herself was sixteen.)

Although Sybylla, our heroine, grows up on a poor dairy farm and believes that she’s ugly and useless, within two chapters of moving to live with her higher class relations she’s discovered to be brilliantly talented at both music and acting. And while she may not be pretty, she’s something even better: her face is so striking and mobile that men can’t help but fall in love with her! She’s snubbing suitors left and right already.

I’m trying not to find this aggravating, but… I’m finding it aggravating. I really preferred the movie, which dispensed with most of Sybylla’s self-loathing yet oddly self-satisfied internal monologue.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m going to be spending a week in a cabin in Canada and I intend to do some hardcore reading while I’m there! (Also some fishing. And some writing. I may have planned too much for one vacation.) In particular, I’m taking a second whack at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for my July reading challenge: “a book that’s more than 500 pages.”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Holly Webb’s Return to the Secret Garden, which has a charming premise - evacuee children during World War II sent to Misselthwaite Manor! - and proceeds to use it to make the our beloved Secret Garden characters heirs to all the miseries of history.

No, I did not want to read about Dickon becoming a grumpy old man because during World War I he got facial scarring so severe that children flinch away from him. Nor did I want to read about Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk in World War II. No! The fact that it was a heroic death does not make it better! COLIN CRAVEN IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO DIE, DID YOU NOT EVEN READ THE SECRET GARDEN.

I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.

What I’m Reading Now

I read a lot of books by women because generally speaking I find them less likely to be misogynistic than books by men. But there’s generally, and then there’s Edna Ferber, whose writing I don’t remember being nearly this soaked in misogynistic tropes in Dawn O’Hara. Maybe she soured as she got older, soured by her life as a ~failed spinster~ - spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.

Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.

Ugh. I’m going to finish the book because it’s part of the Unread Book Club and I intend to finish them all, but UGH.

In cheerier news - well, cheerier is the wrong word. But in more pleasurable if somewhat soul-destroying reading news, I’ve started Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is beautiful and wonderfully observed (and a good example of how to write a story set in a deeply sexist culture without making the story itself sexist, so TAKE THAT, Edna Ferber) and weirdly engrossing. I meant to do other things yesterday evening and instead gulped down the first half of the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

My reading challenge for September is “a book by an #ownvoices or #diversebooks author.” I was already planning to read Ashley Bryan’s Freedom Over Me, which won a Newbery Honor this year (also, I just looked Bryan up, and he’s 94 years old. Ninety-four and still winning book awards! I find it strangely inspiring), and also Jewell Parker Rhodes Bayou Magic, which looked intriguing when I found it at the used bookstore… although upon looking it up online, it looks like it’s the third in a trilogy, so maybe I ought to start at the beginning?

Upon further inspection, it looks like a rather loosely knit trilogy, so probably I can start with Bayou Magic and go back and read the others if I like it. I was planning to find a third book to make it a hat trick anyway - if I don’t like Bayou Magic enough to want to read the rest of that series, then maybe Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Mighty Miss Malone.