Fourth Comings

Why did I read so many novellas this week? Because my enthusiasm for re-reading Megan McCafferty's books so I could better enjoy Fourth Comings sputtered and died mid-week (and mid-Second Helpings). I just couldn't face Charmed Thirds again, though I'd enjoyed it the first time around. The fourth book didn't look better, hence my lack of enthusiasm. So I skimmed the last two books instead. So I couldn't do a serious review of the fourth book, but I will say this: I don't understand why reviewers have been criticizing the ending. The ending was inevitable. Were they really hoping for a rosy ending? I'm mildly curious to see whether a hinted-at, rocking-Jessica's-foundations relationship between two characters will happen in the fifth book, if there is one, but I'll sleep well at night while I wait.
I think my favorite pages were the ones with Bridget - she and Percy are my favorite characters.
I leave for vacation in the morning. Here's what I'm bringing: Rebecca, because I haven't re-read it for years. Also The Marlows and Their Maker, a new addition to my bookshelves. It's about Antonia Forest, the British children's author, and her books. So of course I have to bring Forest books. I chose three: End of Term, Peter's Room, and Cricket Term. Should be fun, though I don't expect to have a lot of time for reading.

Kissing the Bee, and D.A.

I'm not sure why Kathe Koja is so underrated. I read Kissing the Bee in one sitting tonight (not difficult, because it's such a short book) and was very taken with it. I liked Talk just as much. Kissing the Bee, in particular, had a precision of language rarely seen outside a Cynthia Voigt novel, which was well suited to Dana, the main character. Koja has the gift of knowing when to stop - a lesser author might have stretched this book for another 50 pages, but the length (it was almost a novella) was just right.
Talking of novellas I've enjoyed, I read Connie Willis's D.A. this week. It was almost too slight in retrospect, but at the time, I really liked it. It wasn't Bellwether (easily my favorite Willis novel, more even than To Say Nothing of the Dog), but it had some similarities.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

I don't usually blog about questions from work, but I can't pass this one up. A woman was surprised and indignant today because we shelve Laura Ingalls Wilder's books in fiction. I mean, I could see putting West from Home in the biographies, but Little House in the Big Woods, the book in question?

An obituary I've been dreading...

Madeleine L'Engle is dead - here's a link to her obituary. It's not as though I want authors to stay alive forever just so I can read their books, because that's crazy and selfish. I just hope shefelt she had enough time here.
For comfort, maybe I'll go find my copy of A Severed Wasp; if memory serves me correctly, Katherine is wise about death (and anguished - I've just remembered the part about the Second Kermesse Suite).

mysteries for children

Earlier this summer, I was discussing juvenile mysteries with a group of kids. I was trying to teach them the idea of "when you know how, you know who", because I'm a Dorothy L. Sayers fan. But before I could get started, I realized that taken as a body, juvenile mysteries don't have red herrings, or complex motives, or most of the other elaborations that make adult mysteries difficult to solve. Once I realized that, I stopped being quite so irritated with Sobol for making Encyclopedia Brown mysteries almost impossible to solve without a perpetual calendar, or an intimate knowledge of all flora and fauna.

in the interests of full disclosure...

I feel I should mention that I absolutely can't stand books that feature a protagonist who takes a literal journey, and in so doing learns about himself or herself.
Why is this relevant? Well, Guyaholic features one of these journeys. To add further, um, depth, Mackler had V get lost once or twice on the trip. See? She got lost! That's similar to V's confusion about - oh. Yeah. You sussed that out already.

more about Mackler

I've posted about Carolyn Mackler before, more than once. It's a miracle that I like The Earth, My Butt..., because wow - I just finished her new book, and Mackler has to be one of the most stilted writers on the planet. No one anywhere speaks or thinks like one of her characters. It's just not possible.
Here's a sample at a fast-food restaurant (Guyaholic, pp. 118-119):
"...the guy behind the counter says, 'What do you want?'
I stare at him.
'What do you want?' he asks again.
What do I want?
I want to forget."

Oh, good heavens. As the folks at Television Without Pity would say, shut up, Carolyn Mackler. Why did I read the book, you ask? Professional obligations, my dear.

ETA: My SO thought that he might think something like "I want to forget" (though he's wrong, and he said so), but my quotation above was chosen at random, and for brevity's sake. For a longer sample, try pp. 138-139. I tensed up when V pulled off the highway to go to Whole Foods, but didn't start grinding my teeth until "I can't believe I'm admitting this, but after a thousand miles of Pringles and pretzels and Pop-Tarts, I'm actually craving something real." Again - whose internal dialogue sounds like that?

my Amurrican accent

I got a box of books in the mail this week: five new Brazils, two Elinor Brent-Dyer books (Lorna at Wynyards and Stepsisters for Lorna, which I've just started), and one called The School on Castle Hillby Evelyn Simms. This one features a girl who was brought up in New Orleans, and Simms chose to write this character's dialogue phonetically. So she says things like "Avenoo", "Murcy", and "Yurrup". These startled me, because I grew up nearly 1000 miles from New Orleans, and I pronounce "Avenue", "Mercy" and "Europe" this way. In fact, I have to put on a terribly affected, very false English accent to pronouce "Mercy" differently, and I can't make "avenue" or "Europe" different at all. The only word the character and I say differently is "very", which she pronounces "vurry" (which doesn't sound like a New Orleans accent to me at all!).
So the question is: was Simms unskilled at writing phonetic versions of a Southern accent, or is my accent far more Southern than I thought?