It's a Wednesday

May. 28th, 2025 06:32 am
lunabee34: (cat's moon by ponders_life)
[personal profile] lunabee34
1. Ha ha! I am vindicated.

So, my family will sometimes say stob for a small stump or a stick sticking up out of the ground or a broken off piece of fencing. Josh has insisted repeatedly over the years that this is not a real word and just something weird my family says. However, I'm reading one of Rick Bragg's memoirs and he uses the word stob, which prompted me to look it up in the dictionary and confirm it is indeed a real word and not just another example of the ways in which I belong to a bunch of hicks. I've always assumed it's a bastardization of the word stave.

2. Fiona is sick again. She has the flu now, and the pediatrician had us go to the hospital so she could get a chest x-ray (I guess their machine is better than the one at the pediatrician's, IDK). We haven't heard back about the results of the x-ray, but I really hope she doesn't have pneumonia again. I just don't understand why she keeps getting these respiratory things.

3. Dylan has a weird lump on her shoulder that we think might be lupus-related. The rheumatologist is sending her to an orthopedist to look at it (which makes no sense to me), so hopefully we'll know more about it soon.

4. I have to go to the dentist today. I've been putting it off as long as I can because I am a ding ding, but I hate going to the dentist so much. :(

5. We watched The Wild Robot on Netflix. Fiona loves the book(s?), and she was satisfied with the movie as an adaptation even though it made some minor changes to character and plot. All three of us ended up crying multiple times throughout; Josh popped into the living room at one point and turned heel and left again immediately. LOL Definitely worth a watch.

what a find by O. G.

May. 27th, 2025 08:57 pm
musesfool: the ocean (your ocean refuses no river)
[personal profile] musesfool
I slept through for a full 7 hours last night! right up until my alarm went off, actually, without waking up once!

I also got some fantastic videos of Baby Miss L going nuts about TATOES and BROCCOLI and also some mouse game she plays on my sister's tablet. She is such a character! <333

I haven't started the new season of Poker Face or Andor yet - I am still in HGTV mode. No emotional investment, and it satisfies both my nosiness about other people's houses and my need to be judgy about other people's aesthetic taste without hurting anyone's feelings.

Every time someone says they want to go BOLD with color and their palette is black and white I want to punch them. (I'm not saying black and white can't be a bold choice, just that it's not a bold COLOR choice.) Everyone wants POPS of COLOR but then the color turns out to be greige. I just...find it wearisome sometimes. I get it if you are doing a quick refresh in order to sell, since allegedly neutrals sell better? But these are people supposedly doing their "forever homes" or their "dream homes" so why not pick something interesting? At least a little bit? In the downstairs powder room??? I'm begging you, please!

Ahem.

If you asked me what my preferred home decor aesthetic is, I would say beachy with lots of blues and greens in various shades, and okay, a lot of white, a little gray, and some occasional wood or wicker accents. Definitely would want hardwood floors (or LVP that looked like hardwood). I'd want a large zero-access shower with a built-in bench with some fancy tile, and I wouldn't want to waste space on a tub (or double sinks, since I live alone), but I would like more linen/towel storage.

I would obviously want a large chef's kitchen, with FULL SIZE appliances and a big range - I don't go for that countertop stovetop and wall oven set up, I'd want a bigass stove with six burners - and I certainly wouldn't put it (or the sink) on an island. I'd like a large butcher block work surface and a breakfast nook with an eastern exposure, but don't need a formal dining room or a ginormous island. I do like white upper cabinets, probably with reeded glass doors, and then a color on the lower cabinets - a cobalt blue, maybe, or a deep teal.

The place I might go a little modern/industrial/maybe even avant garde would be in the light fixtures. I have seen some WILD chandeliers and lighting options on these shows and some of them are gorgeous.

Obviously I worked a lot of this out in the time between going into contract on my apartment and finally closing, so I was able to pick stuff out that all kind of went together, because I absolutely understand being a renter for years and not really being able to put your stamp on a place. (all the people who already live in their own houses who have no sense of their own style, though - they kind of baffle me, because didn't they paint/decorate their house? I get maybe not knowing what your architectural style is but these are mainly people in their 30s and older - they should have some sense of what they like, shouldn't they, even if they can't pin it to a specific style?)

Anyway, I don't need people to do their own homes in my preferred style, and some of these homes turn out to be gorgeous, but it would be nice if everyone wasn't doing the same things across several different home renovation shows. I guess HGTV has a bit of a house style? But if you've watched any of it, you can see why Keith and Evan from Bargain Block are my favorites - they actually do a lot of fun different things (or they used to, anyway), where even if it isn't something I'd choose, it still has a strong sense of style.

*

Things

May. 28th, 2025 12:48 am
vass: a man in a bat suit says "I am a model of mental health!" (Bats)
[personal profile] vass
(One day early or thirteen days late, depending how you count.)

Books
Finished reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth. Despite how long it took me to read it, it was a good fantasy romance novel. If it weren't the middle novel in a trilogy with m/m couples for books one and three, I'd be reccing this one to nearly every f/f romance reader I know, actually. As it is, well, that recommendation stands if either you read m/m too or don't mind reading book two of a trilogy as a standalone when it really would work better as book two.

It's not a heist novel, but it pushed some of the same anxiety buttons for me that heist plots do, which is probably at least part of why it took me so long.

A thing I'd like to note: a lot of times when I read f/f romance by an author who mostly writes m/f or m/m, the f/f doesn't ring very convincing to me (same problem with m/f romance authors writing m/m.) This was Freya Marske's second published novel, so I don't know what she "usually" writes, but this did ring convincing. I believed that Violet was bi, and I believed in Maude's lesbian awakening, and I believed in their attraction to each other.

My paper copy of Cameron Reed's The Fortunate Fall arrived in the mail. I read it back in uni (borrowed from the Rowden White Library in the early 2000s) but hadn't owned it until now.

About midway through Jazz Money's how to make a basket, a 2021 book of poems in which Wiradjuri words grow up through the cracks of the English.

Started reading KJ Charles' Death in the Spires. (Waiting for the "in spires" pun to drop.)

Not books but literary analysis: I read Andrea Long Chu's 2022 article Hanya's Boys, on Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. I haven't read the novel itself, and don't think I want to. And I think Chu is very incisive and good at what she does. But also: wow, mean. Maybe the meanest literary review I've read in I don't know how long. Came away feeling defensive on Yanagihara's behalf as someone who has ever read even one whump fanfic.

Fandom
Prophet: [personal profile] rydra_wong posted her post-canon 'a word you've never understood'. I don't know that I can recommend it to people who haven't read Prophet (I can recommend they read Prophet and then read Rydra's fic) but if you have read the book and liked it and are someone who reads fanfic then I unreservedly recommend this fic. I've been looking forward to this one since Rydra started writing it (under extremely stressful writing conditions) and I'm so happy she did.

Comics
I cackled out loud (very loudly) at the (nsfw-ish) recent Dumbing of Age strip titled 'Fingering'. And then went "aww" in a sad way at the next page. Joyce and Dorothy are both going through some things, and afaik poor Joe has no idea.

Making
Made another linocut, this one a bookmark-shaped print of stacks of books. It came out nicely: I'm pleased. I like the idea of bookmark-shaped lino printing: it's a manageable size for a project, and produces objects I can use, or that I can give as gifts without worrying about giving clutter.

Tech
Felt the urge to spend some days spending more time changing my laptop's window manager configurations than talking to people. You know how it is. And it does look better than it did before, although somehow I changed the lockscreen without realising I'd done so, which was a bit of a shock when I locked the screen for the first time after that.

It was after I wrote that post (Tuesday last week, I think?) that my laptop's wifi card started disconnecting randomly while I was using it and needing the external wifi/radio switch[*] jiggled to reconnect it. Then it stopped reconnecting and I had a crash course in Linux kernel drivers for WWAN, WLAN, and Bluetooth, what rfkill does, the difference between soft-blocked and hard-blocked wifi, etc.

cut for length )

Games
More Slay the Spire: still no infinity deck, but I got the 'Ooh, Donut' achievement for killing Donu with a Feed card. So that was satisfying.

Garden
I bought a little (less than one square metre) pop-up greenhouse tent thing, set it up outside, and planted the basil cutting there. A few days later I woke up and found that it was gone. Tent and all.

I have no idea what could cause that. Did I not put the stakes in deep enough? Did some basil-loving animal come into my back yard? ???

Weather
It's finally cold. Cold enough, in fact, that last week I purchased an electric foot warmer for those "oops, my toes are all corpse white" times. I'll keep looking for a less e-wasteful solution, but I'd like to still have toes by the time I come up with it.

Miscellaneous
Last week I had to get a routine blood test. I noticed that there was a case under the exam bed across the room from the chair I was in. I couldn't tell what instrument it was, it was a bit too broad and flat for a trumpet. Banjo, maybe? Ukulele? "Aha," I thought: "an opportunity to make small talk as the humans do!"

When it was my turn in the conversation to provide a line, I asked "What instrument do you play?"
"I actually don't play an instrument," the phlebotomist said. "It's funny that you thought I did..." and then followed my gaze to the case. "Oh! That's not an instrument. A patient gave me that. She was cleaning out and thought I might like it. It's actually an arm. A rubber one, for practising giving injections. She thought I could give it to the company, but they have their own training materials. I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Fancy dress, maybe?"

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 07:39 am
skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
[personal profile] skygiants
I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )

at the knees with a cutter

May. 25th, 2025 08:42 pm
musesfool: key lime pie (pie = love)
[personal profile] musesfool
The bbq was fun, even if the weather was chilly and rainy. We saw a huge double rainbow after it rained, and one of them was the most vivid and long-lasting rainbow I ever saw. it was pretty amazing.

Baby Miss L had a grand old time her in personal ball pit, and dancing to both the 90s playlist (it was a 90s-themed party) and later to her own favorite Elmo songs. She was really vibing with Pantera and Alice in Chains - that child is going to be in the mosh pit at the club before you know it.

In other news, Alyssa tried the confetti cookies and really liked them. This morning, she texted me like, "this is exactly what they're supposed to taste like!" Anthony and my sister also liked them, so I guess it's just me, but thy were disgustingly sweet to me. *hands* Trish also liked the brownies, so that worked out too! I will definitely have to make the brownies again, so I can taste them. My sister made ice cream cone cupcakes for the party, which I guess she used to make for the kids to take to school for their birthday's back in the day, so there was a nostalgia factor involved. They were good, though I still like my chocolate cupcake recipe best. *g*

Now I'm watching the Mets, though really, I'm listening to the local radio broadcast because good lord the ESPN broadcast is the worst. Simply terrible in all aspects.

*

Murderbot ep 3

May. 24th, 2025 08:23 pm
seascribble: the view of boba fett's codpiece and smoking blaster from if you were on the ground (Default)
[personal profile] seascribble
Did we really used to live on 22 minutes of our shows week to week? It's rough out there, man. I'm glad they're spreading out the run but I do sort of wish the episodes were a little longer (but Sea, you said you didn't know how they were possibly going to turn the novella into ten episodes. And I still don't but that's their problem, I'm having a good time)
Spoilers )


Very keen for next week's episode. I've watched all of three of them three times through, which I usually don't do so that's one pro of them being short as well as I think a comment on the overall quality.

Finally a diagnosis

May. 24th, 2025 07:52 am
lunabee34: (Default)
[personal profile] lunabee34
1. Dylan has been diagnosed with lupus and given medication. When we got done with the appointment, I sat in the car and cried. It's been so long with no one helping us that I had started to despair that it would ever happen. I'm scared, of course; I don't want my child to have lupus. But this means they can now take medicine to make them feel better, and they can get accommodations at school if they need to because they have a formal diagnosis.

I am also incandescently angry at the first rheumatologist we saw. Dylan's labs are essentially THE SAME as when we saw that doc; she just didn't think Dylan was SICK ENOUGH to do anything about. They could have been getting help all this time.

In the same vein, I've got a routine appointment with my PCP later this summer; I'm going to have her run the same labs she did on Dylan that led to the referral, and if my labs are at similar levels, I'm going to get a referral to the same rheumatologist. I have always firmly believed that Dylan and I have the same issue, just that they started on the path much earlier and much more severely. I couldn't get that awful rheumatologist to take me seriously, but clearly this one will.

I haven't said anything to my parents yet. I guess I will next time we talk, but I don't want to initiate contact with them. I know mom's going to be hurt and sad that I didn't immediately tell her, but I don't want to talk to them.

2. spoilers for all of Dragon Prince )

All in all, deeply enjoyable and highly recommended.

makes the one-hand catch

May. 23rd, 2025 10:48 pm
musesfool: key lime pie (pie = love)
[personal profile] musesfool
I'm so tired of people blowing their deadlines and making it my problem. But at the super last minute, it did finally come together so I was able to log off at 3 pm (it's the first Summer Friday of 2025, and we get to sign off at 2:30 until Labor Day).

My sister is having a birthday bbq tomorrow for my oldest and youngest nieces, who share a birthday, and one requested Smitten Kitchen confetti cookies (even though I told her I found them too sweet) and the other requested brownies (which is why I asked about brownie recipes yesterday - I don't make them often anymore so I don't have a go-to recipe). I couldn't lay hands on dutched cocoa for love or money today, but it turns out that the King Arthur "triple cocoa" or whatever it's called, works in recipes calling for dutched cocoa, and I have that. *hands* But like, nobody even has Hershey's special dark! I was surprised by that. Anyway I ended up making these King Arthur Fudge Brownies and they smell fantastic, though next time I will probably try the microwave to melt the butter instead of doing it on the stove - I did it in a pot on the stove and even on low heat, it got so hot that I had to wait like 30 minutes for it to cool to the temperature required by the recipe (110° - 120°F), so it took a lot longer than I planned for. Other than that, the recipe is really easy. I guess because you beat the cocoa into the eggs, you don't have to worry about the hot butter/sugar mixture scrambling them (you laugh, but that happened to me once with the old mascarpone brownies recipe when I added the melted butter!).

I hope they both enjoy them!

I also bought a banana squishmallow for Baby Miss L, because her response to them has been A++ hilarious every time.

Hopefully the weather tomorrow cooperates. It has rained here so much. Today it rained all morning and then the sun came out late in the afternoon, and then...it poured while the sun was out for a while, and the temperature has lingered in the low 60s. I mean, I'll take the cooler temps for sure, especially at night, but I'm really tired of the rain.

In other news, last night I fell asleep on the couch when I was trying to read, so when I woke up, I decided to just go to bed, and for once, couch sleepy did translate to bed sleepy and I ended up sleeping for almost 10 hours last night! It was glorious! But I don't think I can realistically make myself go to bed at 10:15 every night. *glances at clock* I mean...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

*

When I needed sunshine I got rain

May. 22nd, 2025 05:55 pm
musesfool: key lime pie (pie = love)
[personal profile] musesfool
So it turns out that all that rain and wind last night was due to a nor'easter. In late May. What the actual fuck. But climate change is a hoax.

Anyway, hit me with your favorite brownie recipes! I myself prefer them fudgy instead of cakey, but I am open to variations.

*
musesfool: Olivia Dunham, PI (there are blondes and blondes)
[personal profile] musesfool
Today was chilly and rainy - it was hard to get out of bed, were I was so cozy and warm. Part of me was like, is it May 21st or March 21st? I like it being cooler at night, but I'm so tired of all the rain.

I was supposed to go into the office yesterday, but my meeting got moved to tomorrow on Zoom, so I didn't have to go in. Luckily, my boss understands that I'm much more productive at home, and doesn't demand my presence more than once a month or so (if that). It's just been stupidly busy with the search committee stuff, though she and I are getting ourselves through it by clinging to the idea that once the search firm is on board, there will be significantly less of that work on our plates. *fingers crossed*

Meanwhile, I read another book:

What I've just finished: Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead by Elle Cosimano, the second book in the series. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't think too hard about any of it - just keep it light and breezy - because otherwise it's very hard to believe some of the things the characters choose to do.

What I'm reading now/next: Probably the next book in the series, Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun, since I don't want to lose momentum (okay, I did lose momentum between books 1 and 2 - I had 2 open in a tab for weeks before I actually settled into reading it; sometimes all I want is Batfamily, which is still my main interest in fic-reading these days, for whatever reason).

*

a variety of other things

May. 18th, 2025 07:58 pm
musesfool: a baseball and bat on the grass (the crack of ash on horsehide)
[personal profile] musesfool
I enjoyed this week's Leverage. spoilers )

I also watched the first two episodes of Murderbot. It was cute. I like Mensah a lot. I only read the first novella and thought it was fine but not at all memorable, so I have no real dog in this hunt. spoiler )

Ugh, I just found out the Mets are on ESPN next Sunday night too. ESPN is the worst broadcast.

*
rydra_wong: The UK cover of "Prophet" by Blaché and Macdonald, showing the title written vertically in iridescent colours (prophet)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
It took me a year to drag this fic out of the scorched earth that certain parts of my brain have been since my Epic Psychiatric Misadventures, I think it's genuinely one of the better things I've written, and I am very proud of it.

a word you've never understood on AO3 (Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald, M, Sunil Rao/Adam Rubenstein, 9K words)

Summary: He’s been starving for so long. He thinks he’s never not been starving.

Note: massive spoilers for canon, and probably won't make a lot of sense if you've not read it. I am aware this is niche.

MEDIA!!!!! Murderbot, Andor

May. 17th, 2025 10:28 am
seascribble: the view of boba fett's codpiece and smoking blaster from if you were on the ground (Default)
[personal profile] seascribble
Some Murderbot squee and some Andor highs and lows.


Misc Andor spoilers )

I'll probably watch it all again, but I don't think a rewatch will change my feelings. S1 was phenomenal and I think S2 had the bones to be, with some truly fantastic parts, but it didn't deliver. I know we've been after Tony about race since Aldhani which I think is a valid criticism, but I felt like on the whole, women got a better portrayal in S1, and I can't help but wonder if the reason things felt so misogynist and blah in a lot of places this season was yet again because of time--falling back on lazy tropes, prioritizing other arcs and characters because of the role they play in Rogue One--where when you have more time to tell the story, you can spend more of it on those characters and maybe notice the places you fall down or maybe it's not even conscious, it's just with more space there's more room for women and that storytelling and so it ends up in there making things more complex. Sort of like how Mad Max gave us so many good women characters that you couldn't have in a traditional movie because there was the space for all those different stories and archetypes, rather than just the one or two Representations.


ANYWAY. MURDERBOT.

This fandom is a buckwild place, and I do not recommend engaging with it. People just want to be mad, I think, and also have poor media literacy/have projected so much of their own Identity onto this character that when it deviates from their projection, they can't handle it. Fortunately, the stuff I am seeing in my circles is all positive and people are engaging maturely.

DID YOU GUYS KNOW THAT ALEXANDER SKARSGARD WAXED HIS ENTIRE BODY THROUGHOUT THE PRODUCTION TO BE A BETTER ROBOT? They were like "you don't have to" and he was like "no I'm gonna." I am simply Obsessed with him, what an absolute freak. Apparently he also put a lot of work into making this thing happen and happen the way he wanted it to, which was that he would get to play an anxious and avoidant freak, which I deeply respect.

He completely nails it. The snarky tone of voice, the dorkiness, the panic at being perceived or having to make eyecontact, the vibe of the character very much being separate from humans in meaningful and immutable ways.

I don't think I've seen anything else he's been in, so I can't compare his performance, maybe he's just Like This, but regardless, it works so well. The rest of the cast is ADORABLE. They're just. Perfect. They're goofy and sweet and caring and awkward. Everything is just a little over the top, in a fun way? Oh and they made Pin-Lee nonbinary to match Sabrina Wu!

I think the set and costuming design and the times they use CGI are all also really well done. Nothing is Excessive and it all feels very technofuturist and they don't shy away from the grim parts of the books at all at least so far.

minor spoilers )

We are actually paying for Apple TV to watch it, mostly because we want to support Martha and encourage S2.

Gender Free World shirts

May. 16th, 2025 09:00 am
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
If you don't want to pre-order, you can just go to:

https://www.gfwclothing.com/collections/shirts

and sort by your body shape/size to see if they have anything fitting you left over in stock from previous batches.

As I have said many times before: cannot rec too highly, turns out that shirts that actually fit look incredibly good.
musesfool: iconic supergirl (up up and away)
[personal profile] musesfool
I realize I owe replies to comments and I will get to that. Work has just been eating my brain lately and not leaving much leftover.

In the meantime, I bring you two cool links:

- the Superman trailer which looks so good (I also ordered this adorable Superman dress for Baby Miss L); and

- this interview with John DeMarisco, who directs Mets games for SNY (and a cool behind the scenes video here).

*

(no subject)

May. 15th, 2025 08:15 am
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
While on the topic of Genre Mystery I also want to write up Nev Marsh's Murder in Old Bombay, a book marketed and titled as mystery-qua-mystery that I do not think really succeeds as either a mystery or a romance. However! It absolutely nails it as a kind of genre that we don't have as much anymore as a genre but that I really unironically love: picaresque adventure through a richly-realized historical milieu in which our protagonist happens by chance to stumble into, across, around, and through various significant events.

(I said this to [personal profile] genarti, and she said, 'that kind of book absolutely does still exist,' and okay, true, yes, it does, but it doesn't exist as Genre! it gets published as Literary Fiction and does not proliferate in mass-market paperback and mass-market paperback is where I want to be looking for it.)

Murder in Old Bombay is set in 1892 and focuses on Number One Sherlock Holmes Fan Captain Jim Agnihotri, an Anglo-Indian Orphan of Mysterious Parentage who while convalescing in hospital becomes obsessed with the unsolved murders of two local Parsi women -- a new bride and her teenaged sister-in-law -- who fell dramatically out of a clock tower to their deaths.

Having left the British Army, and finding himself somewhat at loose ends, Captain Jim goes to write an article about the murder and soon finds himself engaged as private detective to the grieving family. In the course of trying to solve the mystery, he falls in love with the whole family -- including and especially but not exclusively the Spirited Young Socialite Daughter -- and also wanders all around India bumping into various Battles, Political Intrigues and High-Tension Situations.

Why do I say the mystery does not work? Well, this is the author's first book, and you can sort of tell in the way the actual clues to the mystery become assembled: a lot of, 'oh, I picked up this piece of paper! conveniently it tells me exactly what I need to know!' and 'I went to the this location and the first person I saw happened to be the person I was looking for, and we fell immediately into conversation and he told me everything!' You know, you can see the strings.

Why do I say the romance does not work? Well, it's the most by-the-numbers relationship in the book ... Diana has exactly all the virtues that you'd expect of a Spirited Young Parsi Socialite from 1892 written in 2020, and lacks all of the vices that you'd expect likewise. Jim thinks she's the bees' knees, but alas! he is a poor army captain of mysterious parentage and class and community divide them. Every time they even come close to actually talking about their different beliefs and prejudices the book immediately pulls back and goes Look! she's so Spirited! It's fine.

However, the portrait of place and time is so rich and fun -- Nev Marsh talks a bit in the afterword about how much the central family and community in question draws on her own family history, and she is clearly having a wonderful time doing it. The setting feels confident in a way that plot doesn't quite, and the setting is unusual and interesting enough to find in an English-language mystery that this goes a long way for me. And, structurally, although the twists involving the Mystery were rarely satisfying to me, I loved it every time historical events came crashing into the plot and forced Captain Jim to stop worrying about the mystery for a few chapters and have some Historical Adventure instead. My favorite portion of the book is the middle part, which he spends collecting a small orphanage's worth of lost children and then is so sad when it turns out most of them do have living parents and he has to give them back. I'm also sad that you had to give the orphans back, Captain Jim.

Profile

hermionesviolin: an image of Alyson Hannigan (who plays Willow Rosenberg) with animated text "you think you know / what you are / what's to come / you haven't even / BEGUN" (Default)
Elizabeth (the delinquent, ecumenical)

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678 910
111213 14151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Style Credit

Page generated May. 28th, 2025 10:38 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios
OSZAR »