This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You, by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas. W.W. Norton & Co, 2022

I found this book very interesting- the main author was a recording engineer for years (working with such people and Prince and Bare Naked Ladies) and has many stories about how creating an album works. After being an engineer, she went back to college and became a neuroscientist, specializing in how music and sound works in people’s brains (Ogas, her co-author, is also a neuroscientist that works in sound). So she understands music and sound from multiple angles. She explains what seven different aspects of music are- lyrics, melody, rhythm, timbre, novelty, realism, and authenticity- and how they work. She talks about doing ‘record pulls’, where multiple people bring out their favorite music and share it, and how, if you like a certain musician, you’ll probably like musician “X”, also. It’s a really educational read.

But- there is always a but- at no point does it tell you what the music says about you. Well, I did learn that my complete lack of rhythm is genetic and there is nothing I can do about it, sadly. I was kind of expecting something that told you how empathetic you were or if you were forward thinking. So, I enjoyed the book- lots of anecdotes about working in the music industry and lots of neurology information- but the title is a little deceptive. Four and a half stars.

 

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, by Margarat Atwood. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday 2014

 

Normally, in a collection of short stories, I consider them hit or miss; I find many of them fall flat for me. But this- by one of my favorite authors- is 100% hit. I loved every single one. They deal with aging and death, revenge and some small amount of fantasy.

The first three are intertwined tales, dealing with characters who all interacted in their youth, and how their lives have turned out. An aging poet, who finds that an interviewer is actually interested in his old girlfriend, who wrote fantasy books that he despised, but won incredible success. That woman is dealing with her late husband’s spirit. The other woman in the triangle the poet and the fantasist found themselves in returns, at a funeral.

Other tales include a man who buys at auction storage lockers and finds more than he wanted; another where an author has one best seller- most of the rights to which he signed away in return for his rent being paid. The title story is one of cold revenge. The last story I found disturbing- not because the blind protagonist has Charles Bonnet Syndrome and hallucinates little people around her; she’s fine with that. But rest homes around the world, including the one she lives in, are being assaulted by groups of young people who, upset with the mess the elderly have made of the world the young have to live in, are blockading the gates and preventing supplies from entering, then insisting all the staff leave- and are, finally, entering and killing the oldsters. I found this story so disturbing because I am well aware that us boomers are leaving the world in a sorry state, and that the younger generations hate us, even those of us who had little to do with the creation of said mess. I can easily see her story becoming reality. These are the most memorable of the stories, although they are all good, my favorites being the first three.

 

Just After Sunset, by Stephen King. Scribner, 2008


This is a collection of King's short stories, all but one of which have been previously published in various magazines. As usual with any story collection, there is a variation of quality. Or, I guess I should say, a variation in how much I liked them. They are all quality tales. A couple are sort of sweet, even though they deal with death. (I could think of worse afterlives than spending my time dancing, although I'd prefer a different music selection than what they have in "Willa"). Some seemed like they could easily make episodes of Twilight Zone. A couple bored me. I prefer my horror supernatural, and some of these tales are not that. They're scary- "Gingerbread Girl" is a very tense tale of a lone woman being pursued by a serial killer- but not to my taste. Oddly, the one that made my skin crawl with horror wasn't a supernatural tale. The last story in the book, "A Very Tight Place" is a revenge story- one where the main character is trapped inside a Porta-Potty. This just happened to hit on one of my personal phobias. I give the book 3.5 stars.

 

Sewing and Collecting Vintage Fashions, by Eileen MacIntosh. Chilton Company, 1988

This book is aimed at the very beginner to vintage and historical fashion. It gives a (very) brief overview of Medieval and Tudor fashions, and then heads right into American Colonial, Regency, Victorian, and some Edwardian. These are definitely her eras; she’s also a writer of historical romances and apparently she sets them in these eras. There is info on where to find true vintage fashions, and a little bit about sewing, such as what things must be done by hand because they show and won’t be true to the era. She even gives what fabrics will be true to the various eras, something that is frequently overlooked- polyester satin Medieval gowns, anyone? There are some tiny patterns which you can scale up to human size to make your own reproductions, and a chapter on how to mend and alter vintage pieces to fit you. Other than those, which are to scale, the illustrations are hand doodled, with a few photos. There are a number of pages of resources, but many of them are no longer in existence. There is also a great bibliography- the books are dated but you can almost always find old books via the interlibrary loan system. So, good for a beginning costumer but not so much for anyone with experience. Three stars.

 

1940s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, by Charlotte Fiell; intro. By Emmanuelle Dirix. Welbeck, 2021

The third (and, hopefully, not the last?) of this series gives us a lot more information than the first or even the second. We’ve got 36 pages of text, and it goes over the many changes the world went through in this decade. The Second World War changed the economy, there were shortages of materials, Paris was invaded, and there were radical changes in gender roles. Women went from needing pretty dresses for visiting and shopping to needing trousers and overalls so they could safely work in factories and in the defense industries (my mother was an arc welder in the shipyards, so I heard tales of this in first person, too). The shape of skirts went from full to narrow to accomadate fabric rationing. Hems went up, although not as far as in the 20s. Designers, unable to change silhouettes as they usually did for new seasons, concentrated on buttons, trims, and fabric manipulation to make dresses look new.

The rest of the book is the usual feast of period photos, clothing catalogs, designer drawings, and other period ephemera. There are more pages devoted to accessories and lingerie than in the previous two volumes. I’ve got to give this one a full five stars! l

1930s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, by Charlotte Fiell; intro. By Emmanuelle Dirix. Welbeck, 2021

Like her volume on 1920s fashion, this book clocks in at 500 pages, almost all of them photos and drawings from the era. Once again, most of the magazine pages and ads show the back side of the clothing, which I really like as a sewist of old fashioned costume. I found the introduction to be much more interesting than the one in the 20s book; it talks about the newly burgeoning film industry affected women’s dress- French idea and design, slightly changed Hollywood version, home pattern with less details. (oh, how I wish Hollywood had costume designs like those these days!) Hollywood fashion was luxurious and extremely glamourous, despite of the Depression (or, perhaps, because of- huge, beautiful movies and larger than life stars to take people’s minds off their money problems) and women sewed up their own versions of backless evening gowns and fake fur stoles. After ten or so years of a boyish figure being the ideal form, women, while still slim, were expected now to have a bustline and hips. Nail polish arrived on the scene, a by-product of the car enamal industry, and eye makeup was everywhere. Four and a half stars.

 

Soul Taker: Book Four in the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. ScareStreet, 2021

Cambridge professor and paranormal investigation Marcus Mortlake can’t get a break. It’s his 50^th birthday and he has a new girlfriend, but his best friend is recently dead, and now an enemy from his childhood has come back to haunt him. Something is taking children in the village he grew up in, and it’s the same creature that tried to take him when he was young. This means going back to his old hometown, something he doesn’t relish. His relationship with his father is not good; his father seems to hold him responsible for the long ago death of his mother. On top of all this, the entity may be connected to Crowe, Mortlake’s nemesis.

It was interesting (and sad) to read about Mortlake’s childhood and how he first encountered the paranormal, and I liked the use of a mythological being. His friends all showed up to help, with a rather unique way of dealing with the entity. The Halloween atmosphere of course added to the eerieness. The strands of story that follow from book to book are getting more complicated with each volume, as Crowe tries to gain power in the Game, where he is stuck. I can’t wait to see where this is all going! Five stars.

 

House of Whispers: Book Two of the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. ScareStreet 2021

In this volume of the Mortlake series, we are given a ghost story. This is my favorite type of horror story, but there is more to it than just spirits who lived and died in the house.

Tara’s best friend has gone to visit her brother and sister-in-law’s new place, Haslam House, up north. They are house flippers, and, with their young daughter, have moved into a really old place not much south of Hadrian’s Wall. The daughter draws and speaks of a woman that no one else sees. Anita immediately asks Tara to come up and look into the spirit. When Tara arrives, she finds that what started with whispers at night and some drawings is turning into something more serious. While the first spirit is a spiritualist from the Victorian age and not harmful, not all are so nice. When a séance Tara conducts go bad, she in turn asks Mortlake to come up and see what he thinks can be done. It’s one of those times when nothing seems to go right…

I loved this book! It had all sorts of supernatural goings on in the house, and it brings in a larger story arc than merely what goes on a Haslam House- and that’s complex enough on its own. We get to know Mortlake’s crew better. We get to see that there are different types of spirits, and learn more about how the supernatural universe works in this series. I loved that a large part of the story is standalone, but that the larger story advances. Five stars.

 

Wolfsbane: Book One of the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. Scare Street, 2021

The first in the Mortlake series (of which I read the 3^rd one first…doh), this book, while interesting and suitably creepy, has some of the faults that all ‘origin issues’ do. The characters are new, undeveloped, and their abilities have to be explained, we’re being introduced to how the magic of this world works, and it’s shorter than the following books. But I felt Mortlake was well done, as was Tara- we get an extremely intense introduction to her.

We meet Tara as she is on a hike with her boyfriend. Lost, hungry, and wet with rain, when they come to a fence they decide to climb it as they feel it’ll be a shortcut. They are attacked, though, by creatures that Tara cannot recognize. Her boyfriend falls to the creatures, but Tara gets away, with no memory of how. In the ado surrounding her hospital stay and police questioning, someone slips her a business card with “Mortlake” on it. An internet search shows he’s a professor of myth and legend at Cambridge, with a side line in investigation of paranormal evenets. As an astrophysicist, Tara doesn’t put much faith in the paranormal. But between some things that happened when she was a teen, and the fact that the ‘wolves’ that killed her boyfriend didn’t look like normal wolves, she gives Mortlake a call.

Mortlake accepts her plea for help willingly- he’s already been looking into it. He swiftly pulls his helpers together and I’ll not give anymore or the whole thing will be spoiled. Suffice it to say that their skills, paranormal and physical, mesh into a unit that can face most things. I like that no one person- not even Mortlake- knows or does everything. It takes a village, I guess, to fight the paranormal.

Pretty good for number one in a series; I’ll give it four stars.

 

The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher. Saga Press 2020

I’m not sure whether to call this book a horror story, science fiction, or fantasy. Whatever it is, I loved it.

Freshly divorced and still gob-smacked by this fact Kara goes to live with her aging and eccentric uncle Earl. Earl’s not just your average eccentric; his home is also a museum of weird things: the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy. It’s a tourist spot; people come to see the Fiji Mermaids, Jackalopes, human skulls, posters about Big Foot and aliens, and dioramas of stuffed mice reenacting the end of The Empire Strikes Back. The deal is she will help with the museum in exchange for rent. She’s good at it; she helped out there as a teenager and is used to the bones and stuffed elk head that her grandfather puts over her bed because he knows it was her friend when she was a kid.

When grandpa has to go get knee surgery, Kara is sure she can handle the musuem on her own. Right up until she notices that someone has knocked a hole in the sheetrock in one room. She enlists the aid of the barista next door, Simon, a gay thrift-store, Mad Hatter, goth- to fix the hole. And pretty much as soon as he starts he discovers a very large problem- there is a hallway behind the hole. Which would be fine, except… there is not really anything behind that room. It’s a place that cannot be there.

Of course they enlarge the hole so they can investigate. The more they see, the weirder things get, until they know they are in another world. A world of water, small islands of sand, metal bunkers on the islands, and willows. Lots and lots of willows. Think Algernon Blackwood amount of willows.

This book is seriously creepy. The can’t be there world looks innocent at first, until they start to explore. This is Twilight Zone extended to movie length territory, the biggest fear (to me) being ‘what if they can’t get back”. But there is more to fear than just that; there are things that are just wrong. The book is also seriously funny; Kara and Simon make a great, practical team dealing with the horrors but they also react to fear with humor, which I can relate to. I loved the characters, I loved that there was no love interest thrown in the mix, and I really love that, even though it’s a stand alone as far as I can tell, it could easily be made into a series. I mean, Kara does live in a museum of the weird, and people send them new stuff all the time…. Five stars.

 

 Bloodlust, by David Longhorn; Mortlake Series Book 3. ScareStreet, 2021

I seem to be reading this series all out of order. No wonder I get confused!

In this installment of the adventures of Marcus Mortlake, the professor at St. Ananias College, Cambridge, finds himself meeting a woman from his past: Cassandra. He was a young man when they met; she was way out of his league and seemed to go out of her way to connect with him. When she took him to meet the leader of the cult she’d joined, Nathanial Crowe, things go terribly wrong, and Cassandra and Crowe are presumed dead.

Mortlake, as well as his mentor, Monty Carrington, posseses supernatural powers. They are far from alone in this; the local police force knows about and uses them when cases show signs of supernatural activity. So Marcus is called in when people start being found exsanguinated, little thinking he’s meeting his old nemisis – who didn’t used to be a blood sucker.

The first part of the story moved slowly, moving between past and present. There is an assortment of supernatural talents and beings in this series and several are presented here, on both sides of the confrontation. I found the last part of the book more interesting than the first, although it went by rather quickly. I would have liked a bit more of a give and take, but I could see how it had to be presented as Marcus having only one chance.

I really like Mortlake, Monty, and the policemen they work with. I found Crowe more annoying than terrifying, but really loathed Cassandra. All as the author meant! Four and a half stars; one half star off because of the tedium of the flashback.

 

Tavern of Terror: Short Horror Stories Anthology. Volume One. Scare Street, 2022

A collection of a dozen tales of horror, which all have in common Hannigan’s bar and it’s bartender, Harry. Half of the stories are by Ian Fortey, with a couple by Sara Clancy, a couple by Simon Cluett, and one each by David Longhorn and Kevin Saito.

While the stories are all good, some are more sci-fi than horror. I don’t have a problem with that- I read both- but some folks might be disappointed by that. What did disappoint me was that only the first couple of stories really involved Hannigan’s; in the rest of the stories, it barely rated a mention. And I swear I’ve read a lot of these stories before. Still, like I said, the stories are all well written and have great ideas in them! Four stars; I had to take a star off for not using Hannigan’s well.

 1920s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, by Charlotte Fiell. Welbeck, 2021

This book presents almost 500 pages of 1920s fashion. It is almost all pictures, though, so calling it a sourcebook is a bit of a misnomer. A visual sourcebook, yes. But with less than a dozen pages of text you don’t learn much about how fashion was changing and how it fit into the changes in life itself during the time. But all the images are either photos or drawn pages of advertisement from the era, so it is a huge resource for modern artists, designers, costumers, and social historians. Many of the images show the clothing from the rear as well as the front shot, which makes them invaluable for costumers. Four and a half stars, because I would have liked to have seen more text.

 A Haunting in Hartley – Haunting Clarisse Book 2, by Janice Tremayne. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020. 

In the 1930s, in a small town in the Australian bush, Father Grimaldi is sent to the basement of the church to retrieve an old cross. While down there, he encounters a malevolent spirit who offers him a deal with the devil- literally. Decades later, Harry and Clarisse are sent to the ghost town so Harry can do some research. Upon arrival, they find that the town subsists mainly upon weddings taking place in the old church, and tours by Paranormal Jack, a ghost hunter.

Intrigued by- but skeptical of- the ghost tour, Harry signs up for an extra tour after the main one. This one involves spending the night in the cemetery. Clarisse refuses- she’s had one run in with the paranormal (in the previous book, The Girl in the Scarlet Chair) and doesn’t want another. The next day, Paranormal Jack is killed and his belongings- including many boxes of the papers he’s collected in his ghost hunting- are stored in the church basement- the basement where Harry has been assigned a room as his office. This gives Clarisse a reason to enter the basement- and puts her in range of the spirit.

The plot thickens at this point, flashing back to the 30s and back again to present day. A lot of crimes from the past emerge. What starts out as a regular ghost story turns into something more. In the end, it reminded me of a fairy tale- a deal with a devil, three tests to be faced. It has a decent structure, although some things could have used more explanation- to say which things would be spoilers. Auto-correct seems to have had its way with alarming frequency. Four stars.

 Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, by Joe Queenan. Henry Holt and Company, 2002

 

This book sounded like a funny read; I’m used to seeing Boomers (yes, I was born in 1954, so that’s me, too) slagged on the internet but usually not in a humorous way, so I thought this would make a nice change.

I was disappointed. Yes, some of it is funny- very much so. But he repeats himself from chapter to chapter. And, while he’s funny, he’s mean spirited. He may be a Boomer himself, but it’s obvious he despises a lot of his fellow cohort. He seems to think that being ‘cool’ is all that most of us think about, but we are hardly the only generation to do so. Witness man buns, midnight bike rides, young folks who are every bit as organic and holistic as the original hippies, the reverence for Mid-Century Modern, and a renewal of thrifting for style, not just for economics. The trends for growing one’s own fruit and vegetables (something almost mandatory for the Greatest Generation), as has macrame, crafting your own possessions, and vegetarianism. And the majority of the truly toxic (as opposed to just stereotypical) Boomers are in the upper-middle class; those of us in the lower economic levels didn’t go into arbitrage, turn into stock manipulators, or develop companies that destroyed the environment. We didn’t go from driving a VW to driving a giant SUV, we just changed to driving an old Subaru when the VW parts dried up. Yes, there are those of us at all economic (and toxicity levels) who liked Tapestry and CSN&Y. But despite his sneering at ‘cool’, he himself seems to have never done anything just for fun- heaven forbid he should listen to music that isn’t cool, or wear a T-shirt just because he still likes Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. He’s like the bully in high school who never actually hit anyone, but just threw barbed witticisms at his victims.

Even though he’s a Boomer, he wants all of us Boomers to get off of his lawn. Two stars.

 

Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mick LaSalle. Thomas Dunne Books, 2000

The author is calling the five years between when talkies became the thing and the enforcement of the Production Code- 1929 to 1934. It’s a time that many don’t even know existed; they think that strong women who had sex, had out of wedlock babies, got divorced, didn’t exist until the late 60s. Two women in particular embodied the woman of the era (five years barely constitutes an era!): Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Now, everyone who has even a passing interest in film knows Garbo’s name, but many don’t have a clue who Shearer was. She was intensely driven and consistently strove to break barriers in film; she wore thin, close fitting costumes with no underwear, she had roles where she did the things women in real life were doing but weren’t considered ‘nice’. The fact that she was married to Irving Thalberg, boy-wonder producer at MGM helped; he gave her the green light for the movies she wanted to do.

Shearer and Garbo were the flag bearers, but they opened the way for many, many other female actors. The pre-Code era was the era of actresses: Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, Dietrich, Loretta Young, Constance Bennett, Jean Harlow, and many more started their film careers during this era. The characters they portrayed were, as the title says, complicated women. They were women with choices, until the characters who were given the okay during Code years. During the decades of the Code, if a woman had sex outside of marriage she had to be punished- she died, got thrown in jail, lost her children, or found herself out on the streets. Women had to take whatever men dished out; they were martyrs to marriage and motherhood. If they had careers, they had to give them up or at least make them second to their duties as wives and mothers, and never have more success than their men did.

I found the book very interesting; I’ve been a fan of old movies ever since I was a kid. I knew vaguely about pre-Code movies, but didn’t realize how much was done during those five short years. The book gives both the history of the pre-Code years and the biographies of Garbo and Shearer- especially Shearer. She dominates the pages. And I can see why the author chose her as his icon of the era; while many thing of Mae West when they think about this era, her first movie wasn’t made until 1932. It was fun to read about this era but sad that the Code came into being; the movies weren’t just about sex but about women having their own lives and destinies rather than being appendages of men. They were about how women were really living their lives after the changes of the roaring 20s. They had careers, they didn’t put up with cheating husbands, they gave their opinions. The were complicated! Five stars.

Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher. Tor, 2022

I found Kingfisher’s latest delightful. Written in the style of fairy tales, it is set in a fantasy world where magic of different sorts works. Our heroine, Marra, is the third child of the king and queen of a tiny realm that includes a deep water harbor, a valuable asset. The powerful kingdoms to their north and south both want to control the harbor, and the queen knows what must be done. The oldest daughter, the beautiful and sweet Damia, is wed to the northern prince, with the understanding that their oldest child would rule the north, while the second would rule the harbor kingdom. It’s no time before Damia dies, however, and the middle daughter, Kania, less beautiful and much less sweet, is carried off to be the prince’s next wife and broodmare. At 15, Marra is bundled off to a nunnery to live, hopefully safe and forgotten by the world. Here she lives for 15 years, shoveling animal stalls, working in the kitchen, delivering babies, and spending vast amounts of time learning needlework. Little news gets there, but finally there is a funeral to be held in the northern kingdom; the girl child of Kania and prince Vorling has died. Taken from the nunnery to attend, Marra finds that things are not well in her sister’s life. Not only is she nearly constantly pregnant and failing to produce a viable child, much less a prince, but Marra sees bruises on her sister, who admits they were put there- frequently- by Vorling. This, Marra decides, can not be allowed to go on. Here starts her quest for justice.

Since she is not a nun, but just living there, the abbess cannot stop Marra when she leaves. She seeks the help of a dust-wife, who is a powerful witch who can work with the dead. When Marra tells her what she wants- to free her sister by killing Vorling- she agrees that she will help IF Marra can accomplish three tasks: weave a cloak of owl cloth and nettles, create a living dog from a pit full of bones, and catch the moonlight in a jar. Marra manages the first two, and they are off on their quest. Along the way they gather helpers; a magical godmother, an ex-knight who is held slave in a goblin market, a hen possessed by a demon (but the best layer of the flock), a cursed chick who finds things, an inn keeper with a demonic parasite. The odds are against them, and they have no firm plan, but try they will….

The characters are wonderful. There is no Chosen One, and no one has a gods given Purpose. These are the people who are frequently over looked in stories. Their adventures are fantastical and, at times, absurd. There is a hint of Pratchett in this world, but with few puns and a much more believable set up. This book was a couldn’t- put-it-down one for me. The world is not a pretty, high fantasy one, but a world you could believe once existed on earth. Five shiny stars!

 

 Seasons of a Magical Life: A Pagan Path of Living, by H. Byron Ballard. Weiser Books, 2021

 

At first glance, this book is yet another ‘wheel of the year’ book for pagans. But it’s different from most; for one, the author adds in some celebrations. Surprisingly, she chose to name and time them to the Christian calendar, adding in Rogation days and Ember days. She also explains how the Christian calendar fits nicely with the pagan wheel of the year. This framework defines the rest of the book, going through the seasons. Rather than just talk about how to celebrate the holy/holidays, she talks about living your life in tune with the old ways. She tells it through tales of her own life, and it’s grounded in a country way of living. Gardening, putting food by, mending, weaving, cooking, bread baking, herbs; it’s all there. The instructions for these activities are very brief, but can work as a starting place to interest a person in finding out more about any of it. The stress is very much on connection with nature and the earth.

The writing is good in most places, but there were a couple of spots where it bogged down and I just skimmed. I’m old, so I’ve read some of this many times before. One thing that interested me was that she is aligned with old Appalachian folk magic, rather than following the Celtic path that so many wheel of the year books do. Good for someone new to earth centered spirituality, or looking for a slightly different slant on the subject. Four stars.

 

Paladin’s Grace, by T. Kingfisher. Argyll Productions, 2021

Severed heads – found minus bodies- are what’s on Paladin Stephen’s mind when he is accosted on the street by a fugitive woman, who demands they pretend to be having sex against the wall to throw off her pursuers. As he walks her home, he discovers she’s a perfumer, living in a poor part of town. She’s got secrets; she was sold as a child and then again as an adult, and she’s been criticized and gas-lit into having a horrible image of herself. Stephen is the follower of a berserker god, one who died unexpectedly, leaving his followers with no steering. They did what berserkers do when upset; they went berserk. In the end, only a handful were left. They now help the Rat god, a sect with healers and lawyers. Now they live with constant guilt, and horrible self images. In other words, Stephen and Grace are perfect for each other, if only they could believe that someone could love a person as lowly as themselves.

Meanwhile, there is a visiting potentate, a couple of assassination attempts, more severed heads, thieves, and a lot more, all set in a world of several churches with real live gods, talking quadrupeds (there is one on the police force), magic that works, and a lot more.

I found this world very appealing. It’s well built (it’s the setting for several other novels by the author), and I liked most of the characters. It’s basically a rom/com set in pre-industrial times. I loved Stephen and Grace, even though their lack of ability to just bloody talk to each other made me crazy at times. It’s also a mystery- well, two different mysteries, actually. I really enjoyed the story and the characters, although the ending has a bit of a deus ex machina feeling to part of it. I fully intend to read everything else set in this world!

 Gallant, by V.E. Schwab. Greenwillow Books, 2022

 

Fourteen year old orphan Olivia has never known a home other than Merilance, an orphanage. She is non-verbal, and is bullied and shunned. That’s all right with her; she prefers to be alone, anyway. Her only possession, other than the gray dresses the orphanage provides, is her mother’s old journal, a green notebook with a “G” on the cover. She’s got that book memorized, even though most of it makes no sense to her.

She’s about to age out of the orphanage and be sent somewhere to be a scullery maid or the like, when a letter arrives from her uncle, inviting her to come home to Gallant. And so, off she goes. She cannot remember ever having been off the premises of Merilance, so the trip by hired car is exciting. Her reception, however, is exciting in a less than good way: no one was expecting her, she has no living uncle, the estate is home to only three people-her cousin, the housekeeper, and the groundskeeper- and that cousin tells her to get out. Obviously, she does not heed this advice/order.

Olivia has always been able to see ghosts- she calls them ‘ghouls’- so the fact that the house is full of them doesn’t bother her. They are, though, quite a bit more solid seeming than the ones at Merilance. But that’s not the oddest thing about the place; at the foot of the garden, on the other side of a rock wall, stands another Gallant. It’s almost a mirror image, but the inhabitants are very different. Between both these Gallants, she may be able to figure out her family history; why she is an orphan; and why she is being told to flee.

I enjoyed the book; I stayed up one night with it. But, it’s not solid five star. The writing itself is exquisite, and it leads one on and on. But the plot is thin, and characters other than Olivia are pretty shallow, too. You’d think that, with so few characters, they would have a chance to be fleshed out. Sadly, no. Hannah and Edgar, the staff, are shadowy figures of goodness. Matthew, her cousin, is volatile and storms around and changes his mind rapidly and confusingly. (I’d have things to say about others, but it would be too spoiler-y.) So even though I loved the book on some levels, (and will look at what else the author has written) I can only assign it four stars.

 

The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year, by Linda Raedisch. Llweellyn Publications, 2020 (12^th printing)

I picked up this book, thinking it would be about Christmas ghost stories, and, hopefully, tell some of those stories. It does talk about the British practice of telling ghost stories at Christmas, but it’s really a collection of folk tales and practices, mainly from the more notherly areas of Europe. Elves, of course- although not quite the ones we think of today in respect to Christmas, Christmas beasties like horses and cats, goblins, tontum, witches, Santa Lucia, Yule logs, first-footing, plants and how they became standard Christmas décor, and, my favorite part and something I’d never heard of, vampires and werewolves associated with the dark days! There are even some related crafts and recipes included.

The author tries to stick absolutely everything she learned about Christmas/Yule/Solstice traditions into the book; because of this, the entries are very short and nothing is gone into in real depth. I found that very disappointing. There is, however, a good bibliography in the back so that the reader can go on to learn more about the subjects that take their interest. The book is a bit uneven; there were a couple of sections that I skimmed over after a while, but mostly it’s a fast, if somewhat disjointed, read. Four stars.

Magic Lessons, by Alice Hoffman. Simon and Schuster, 2021

 

The pre-prequel to “Practical Magic”, this book takes us to the 1600s and the life of Maria Owens. Abandoned at birth, she is found and raised by the local witch in rural England. She proves to have great talent for magic, as well as being taught to read and write. When her adoptive mother is killed by a witch hunter, Maria finds her birth mother- also a witch. When her father makes a surprise reappearance, the three of them flee the area. They tell Maria she cannot stay with them, and she finds herself on the way to the New World, although not in the way that she thinks is happening. Maria ends up having a lot of adventures on her way to Salem, and they don’t end when she finds her way there. She ends up pronouncing a curse, that will keep any Owens from finding love for long- and also learns that love is, in the end, all that really matters.

While not quite as good as “Practical Magic” (nothing is), it’s a book I liked much better than I liked the middle book, “Rules of Magic”. It is a stay-up-all-night-reading-it book. Five stars.