Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 134

The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

I probably won't keep writing these up as pretty much everything that I said about # 1 is also true of # 2, though there's less of a voyage of self-discovery as you can only tell the story of "how a widow in her sixties discovered that she makes a really great spy" once. However, the strong supporting cast, travelogue, suspense, humor, and most of all, the delightful Mrs. Pollifax remains. I read this while riding a stationary bike at the gym and repeatedly unnerved my fellow workers-out with bursts of maniacal laughter.

The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax[image error]

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It's FemslashEx time!

Signups for Femslash Exchange are open now!

You can take a look at eligible fandoms and pairings in the tagset.

X-Men, New Mutants, Runaways, and other Marvel comics fandoms are listed as "Marvel 616" under "Cartoons & Comics & Graphic Novels." Original Work and crossover pairings are listed under "No Media," with many pairings with fantastic-sounding stories implied, like...

Dodgy But Charming Covert Operative/Childhood Sweetheart From Before The Lies
Female Rabbi/Female Golem
Robot Freedom Fighter/Human Programmer
Princess Entering An Arranged Marriage/Her Princess Bride
Goddess Who Ended the World/Apocalypse Survivor
Governess in Gothic Mansion/Female Ghost
Governess in Gothic Mansion/Her Charge's Mother Disguised as a Man
Court Poisoner / Court Physician
Dethroned and Dishonored Queen/Lone Loyal Female Knight
Lady locked in a tower/Lady who turns into a hawk
Librarian/Library Ghost
Military officer desperate to redeem her honor/Loyal subordinate trying to keep her alive

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Dear Femslash Exchange Writer...

Thank you for writing for me! I love this exchange and will be thrilled with whatever you write me.

( General Loves )

( General DNWs )

( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

( Original Work )

( Tale of the Five Series - Diane Duane )

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The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

This oddly cozy spy thriller has some similar qualities as Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker: crisp writing, a sheltered and depressed heroine discovering that both her life and her own capacities are far greater than she imagined, and a generous view of humanity despite a fair amount of murder and mayhem.

Mrs. Pollifax, a sixty-something widow with grown children, is quietly depressed. Her life lacks meaning, and also lacks joy. Taking inspiration from an unexpected question from a doctor, she shows up at the CIA and suggests that they hire her as a spy; due to a conglomeration of coincidences and accidents, they actually do hire her, but as a one-time-only courier for a mission which requires someone who absolutely cannot be recognized, and which shouldn’t be dangerous. Needless to say…

While dated in some ways, it’s more due to language than worse things; the large of array of non-American characters generally prove to be a lot more individual and less stereotypical than one might expect. Like the Indian guru in The Tightrope Walker, they all have their own quirks and agendas, all the way down to the cameo by a family of Albanian goat-herders and their herd of goats that Mrs. Pollifax reluctantly hides within.

The sensible, not quite unflappable but certainly hard-to-flap Mrs. Pollifax is a great character, and it’s an immense pleasure to see her in a sequence of escalating dangers in which she is both a fish out of water and a fish who was always meant to be in water, and never got a chance till now.

This was delightful and I am delighted to know that there’s plenty more where it came from.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 1)[image error]

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Manhattan Moon, by Jae

A novellette set after Second Nature, focused on a different set of characters but involving some of the repercussions of the events of that novel. Humans who find out about the existence of the shapeshifting Wrasa are no longer automatically assassinated, but it’s a fragile peace and they still might be assassinated. Therefore, interspecies dating is still forbidden. Which makes it difficult when ER psychiatrist and coyote shifter Shelby falls for her human co-worker, ER nurse Nyla.

Shelby’s a flawed Wrasa, with the metabolism and enhanced senses but unable to shift at will, but still bound by the rules of the community. Still, given her lowly status, maybe no one will notice if she just goes on out on one date... (One incredibly awkward date, as Wrasa normally bring gifts of meat rather than flowers, Nyla’s chihuahua senses Shelby’s Wrasa nature and doesn’t like it one bit, Wrasa can’t see projected movies very well owing to their non-human vision, and they run into a pair of very suspicious fox shifters at the theatre.)

If Shelby tells Nyla her secret, she’ll be putting Nyla at risk and making herself look like a lunatic, as she can’t shift to prove it. But if she doesn’t, how can they ever have a real relationship?

Another nicely detailed and solidly enjoyable lesbian shifter story from Jae. Shelby’s enhanced senses and the Wrasa culture details make for a very fun story, and the central dilemma is convincing and not easily dealt with. I’m guessing Shelby and Nyla will turn up again or at least be heard from in the next book in the series, True Nature, as while this novelette resolved their romance, the larger obstacles are still at play by the end.

Manhattan Moon[image error]

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Ashland Shakespeare Festival, here I come!

Inspired by the Ashland-set lesbian romance Set the Stage, my friend Halle and I are going to the Shakespeare festival next week! We're seeing Love's Labors Lost (which neither of us have ever seen performed) and The Book of Will (an original play about how Shakespeare's friends pieced together Hamlet after his death) on the Elizabethan stage, a new play adapted from an old Chinese one, Snow in Midsummer, at the Bowmer (a large proscenium stage), and Henry V in the Thomas (formerly the Black Swan), a very small black box theatre, usually used as a 3/4 or round stage.

I'm super excited. Ashland set my whole adult life in motion by switching me from an intended career in medicine to one in the arts; that might have happened anyway, but it was a very nice and suitably dramatic way for it to happen. In the middle of one of their plays, Peer Gynt, I watched an actor fight invisible trolls and thought, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life." And I changed my major to theatre arts.

But I hadn't been back in something like 15 years. Has anyone gone more recently (or equally non-recently)? What was it like?

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Fling, Marry, Kill: Mainstream Edition

Hope springs eternal. But I just bought two new bookcases, just in case.

If you're joining late, fling means "read now and see if you like it," marry means "keep for later because you surely will," and kill means "it sucks/you won't like it, toss unread."

If you're familiar with any of these, let me know what you think!

View Poll: Fling, Marry, Kill: Mainstream Fiction

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The Stonewalkers, by Vivien Alcock

Poppy Brown is a lonely girl whose relationship with her mother has been troubled since her mother had a long hospital stay and Poppy had to live with foster parents. Possibly because of this or maybe just exacerbated by it, Poppy has a lying habit. They’re harmless lies, the sort many imaginative kids tell to get attention or because they’re bored or it just occurs to them. But it gets her a lot of adult disapproval and other kids thinking she’s weird.

One day she puts a friendship bracelet around her favorite stone angel statue, Belladonna. Belladonna comes to life. But she’s not friendly. She’s inhuman, alien, terrifying. And of course no one would ever believe anyone who says they’re being stalked by a statue, much less a known liar like Poppy. Luckily for her, she finds an unexpected ally; lucky for Poppy, but maybe not so lucky for her new friend, who then also attracts Belladonna’s attention…

This odd, funny, scary book is a sort of quintessential old-school British children’s book: quirky, vivid, pithy, and very well-written a way that you’ll recognize if that’s a favorite genre of yours. If I’d read it when I was nine, it would have scared the living daylights out of me. As an adult, it’s still pretty unsettling. I wonder if Belladonna was the inspiration for the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who, or if at least two writers just independently thought that those angel statues were creepy, with their blank white eyes, and how much creepier would they be if they started inexorably moving closer… and closer… and closer…?

The Stonewalkers[image error]

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The Tightrope Walker, by Dorothy Gilman

The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

- The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. (Epigraph to The Tightrope Walker)

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

Amelia, a sheltered young woman with a traumatic past, is jolted into life and action when she first becomes the proprietor of an antique shop, then finds a note in an old hurdy-gurdy beginning, They’re going to kill me soon.

The mystery aspect is inextricable from the rest of the book, but it’s also a novel of character development and a book about how to live and thrive in a terrifying world. Amelia has anxiety, social and otherwise, and for good reasons; her evolution from spending most of her time locked in her room alone to engaging with fear and joy, both physical and existential, is beautifully depicted.

I had never read anything by Gilman before, though I had vaguely heard of her Mrs. Pollifax series, about an old woman spy. Amelia is a great character, the themes are moving, the plot is solid, and it has a good supporting cast. Even the wise Indian guru wasn’t that bad (low bar, I know), largely due to his philosophy turning out to not be generic wise guru wisdom but something distinctly odd. The love interest also turned out to much less awful than I initially expected.

Most importantly, the writing style is absolutely fantastic, witty and distinctive and an absolute pleasure to read. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me down. I look forward to reading more of Gilman’s books.

I read this one because someone here (whoever it was, thank you very much!) recommended it for integrating an imaginary book, in this case Amelia’s beloved children’s fantasy The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, into the story. This is very well-done, with just enough detail given to show why it was so meaningful to her and also to make it seem worth reading if you like that sort of thing, and also neatly integrated into the plot and themes. It turns out that after publishing this book, Gilman wrote and published The Maze in the Heart of the Castle! I’m not sure if I want to read it, or just keep on imagining it.

The Tightrope Walker[image error] Only $4.99 on Kindle.

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The Secret of Saturday Cove, by Barbee Oliver Carleton

I earlier reviewed Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge, by the same author, an obscure children’s book with a memorable salt marsh setting and Gothic atmosphere. This book, aimed at a slightly younger audience, is sun-drenched and set in Maine, but also features intertwining mysteries of past and present, a lost treasure, a solid ensemble cast, and a vivid setting with tons of atmosphere – in this case, a lobstering community along an archipelago of teeny tiny islands.

The opening of this one has some annoying “you’re just a girl” bickering between David, a twelve-year-old boy who is very excited to have a real job lobstering, and Sally, his little sister, who is probably about ten. Thankfully, the obligatory sexism gets dropped fairly quickly (and Sally gets to be heroic later.) More interestingly, Carleton shows how the island folk will lay on the “Ayuh, I am an old salt lobsterman” schtick for their own purposes, and how it’s also a real community and culture that David desperately wants in on. Add in a solidly plotted mystery, lightly sketched but real-feeling emotions and relationships, and a lot of really great place descriptions, and you have a book I enjoyed as an adult and would have read a zillion times as a kid.

I wish Carleton had written more books.

The Secret of Saturday Cove[image error]. Only 99 cents on Kindle.

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