Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 10

My November Reading Log

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Fiction:
An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch visited Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island, in 1878. After closing a politically sensitive case in his home country of England, Finch is pressured to visit the United States while the court case unfolds. Along the way he’s dragged into a murder case set among fabulously wealthy Americans who’ve built “cottages” (actually mansions) at the seaside; meanwhile, he muses upon his career and if he wants to continue with it. This novel is fourteenth in ...

#TBRChallenge – Lies: The Conductors by Nicole Glover

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I chose The Conductors by Nicole Glover for the “Lies” theme because it’s a murder mystery. However, it turned out to fit the theme in other ways as well: many of the suspects rewrote themselves and their lives to some extent after being freed from enslavement or moving up in the social order, meaning the investigators must constantly re-evaluate what they know and think they know. In addition, the protagonist Hetty Rhodes is a storyteller, and her thoughts about stories are relevant to the...

My October Reading Log

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Fiction:
Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala is second in a cozy mystery series; I have not read the first book, but was easily able to follow the story. Protagonist Lila Macapagal has returned to the cozy small town of Shady Palms (Somewhere in the Vicinity of Chicago) to live near her family, who own and operate a Filipino restaurant; Lila and two friends, a lesbian couple, are in the process of opening a coffee shop that also sells plants and Filipino-inspired baked goods. As you ...

“Cut Flowers,” Ivor Gurney

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Cut Flowers

Not in blue vases these
Nor white, cut flowers are seen
But in the August meadows
When the reaper falls clean –
And the shining and ridged rows
Of cut stalks show to the eye
As if some child’s hand there
Had ranged them, and passed by
To other rows, other swathes,
Moondaisies, pimpernel,
Eyebright, sorrel, the paths
Are shining, the heaps as well.
Violets in spring, are
In vases, a sweet heap
Better leave them by far
Under hedgerows or banks to keep.
Daffodills, wallflowers, Dai...

Rutabagas and Unicorns: The Windflower by Laura London

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This essay was written in 2012 for Heroes and Heartbreakers; it is no longer available there, as the site is defunct. I’m posting the essay again because Sharon Curtis passed away on September 4, 2022.

Every lady of breeding knows. No one has a good time on a pirate ship. No one, that is, but the pirates. Yet there she was, Merry Wilding—kidnapped in error, taken from a ship bound from New York to England, spirited away in a barrel and swept aboard the infamous Black Joke….There she was, tr...

#TBRChallenge – Exile by Lisa Bradley

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Exile by Lisa Bradley is a post-apocalyptic, character-driven science fiction novel which I bought because I had met and liked the author. The apocalypse in this novel was local, affecting people living nearby with uncontrollable, violent rage. The federal government subsequently quarantined the town, and it’s remained shut away from the outside world, though they do have wifi at least.

Mother was pregnant with Sweet William when an unregulated semi biffed the turn into the parking lot for ...

My September Reading Log

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My September #TBRChallenge Book was Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape; I also read and wrote about Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield by Ed Hotaling in the same post.

Fanfiction:
The Lych Yew Gambit by Delphi for mimsical was an very excellent AU outsider-POV on Severus Snape. I liked this a lot and really wanted to know more about the narrator, a Soviet defector who used to be a chess champion.

A case of you by lotesse is a series of...

Romancing the Beast – Embracing Monstrousness in Romantic SFF

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I have a new post up at the SFWA blog: Romancing the Beast – Embracing Monstrousness in Romantic SFF.

#TBRChallenge – Animals: Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape

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And now for something completely different! I went with horse racing as the sport for this month’s theme. Black Maestro: The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drape is a biography of Black jockey Jimmy Winkfield (1882 – 1974), winner of the Kentucky Derby in both 1901 and 1902, the last Black jockey to do so and one of very few who managed it back-to-back.

Winkfield was the youngest of seventeen children; his father had been freed from slavery via joining the Union army during the Amer...

My August Reading Log

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Fiction:
Abandoned in Death by J. D. Robb is the fifty-fourth in that series, wow, and there are currently two more scheduled to follow. These are comfortingly repetitive despite being about sometimes truly gruesome serial murders, because the killer is always caught and jailed in the end. I also find it interesting to watch the near-future worldbuilding shift and change as it gets closer to present-day. This series began publication in July 1995; the story is set in the mid-twenty-first ce...