October Books

[slemslempike]

Three's a Crowd - Alison Dale (Sweet Dreams)
Too Young for Love - Gailanne Maravel (Sweet Dreams)
Her Secret Self - Rhondi Vilott (Sweet Dreams)
Dead Man's Cove - Lauren St John
The Hawkwood War - Ankaret Wells
My Friend Flora - Jane Duncan
My Friend Madame Zora - Jane Duncan
A Wreath for the Enemy - Pamela Frankau
The Young Artists - Constance M White
The New Girl - Emily Perkins
My Friend Cousin Emmie - Jane Duncan
My Friends the Mrs Millers - Jane Duncan

My ex-colleague lent me Dead Man's Cove with an explanation that it was a bit like a well-done modern day Blyton adventure, which was true. Laura was a little too sedately drawn for my tastes, and while I liked Tariq, the portrayal of his "parents" seemed to draw on a few racist tropes. It did have a great scene of rising water in a tunnel in all the best adventure story tradition.

Another reread of The Hawkwood War because I was stuck without a book in a queue. I read a few pages in the middle to pass the time and then found I needed to read right to the end and then back to the beginning until the middle I'd started at happened again.

My ex-colleague has also been lending me Jane Duncans, and I must finish the one I'm currently on before Thursday when I see her again. Of these I think I liked the Mrs Millers the best, because we got to see more of the people on the island that weren't the white managers and owners, and it actually acknowledged the racism that was around without glossing over it, something that I had felt was missing in previous books. It was also good that Janet was faced with not being liked by someone that she wanted to be liked by.

A Wreath for the Enemy is told in several parts with several narrators. The two parts that stuck with me are the first one, where Penelope of a bohemian household managing a hotel wants desperately to be friends with well-mannered middle class children, but is rebuffed by their parents' attitude towards her house, and sits with a dead woman before being dragged away; and the one where Don, the middle class well-mannered boy, grows up while at school through a deep friendship with a writer and genius and alienates his parents in so doing.

For ages I didn't read The Young Artists as I had it in my head that it would be a dull historical biography about famous artists. It turns out that this is not true, and it's about young people going to art college or not going to art college, and learning what they want to do and how. I rather liked it.

The New Girl was quite distressing. At first it seemed like it was going to annoy me for being a fairly dull tale of a young woman come to a town to rattle them all up and make them be better and more interesting, but then it turns out that she's a horrible, horrible person. She gets bored, and doesn't care about the teens she's running a summer project with. One of them reveals that he's being abused, and she just doesn't do anything about it. She inspires a girl to go to university, and says that she's too good for the town, and too good for the other students, and that she should just hang out with her and be awesome, and then when she eventually shows up she won't talk to the girl and shuns her.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I tried to read one of Lauren St John's books and found it too boring, despite the promise of a three-legged husky in future pages.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

There was a three-legged husky! It did have a very slow start, but got better. Not better enough for me to want to read more, though.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Hee! I should have tried writing the damn thing from the middle and coming back round to the beginning, it might have stopped me getting stuck for months on end on the Awful Corridor Scene.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

That's what I used to do when writing my thesis - but sadly then I always had come back to my version of the dreaded corridor scene at the end.